U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney addresses supporters at the InPro Corporation in Muskego, Wisconsin, March 31, 2012. REUTERS/Darren Hauck
attribution: REUTERS
No one could've predicted that the Obama campaign would actually campaign for votes.
MON DEC 24, 2012

Romney campaign caught off guard by fact that Obama staffers worked

bykosFollowforDaily Kos 

  • 176 Comments 

    • Reason 1,233,454 that Mitt Romney had his ass handed to him:
    It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political ­director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his “better ground game,” could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race is “unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney’s direction,” the memo said.
    But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called “state of the art” crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day.
    So how does the idiot who penned that memo justify himself?
    Rich Beeson, the Romney political director who co­authored the now-discredited Ohio memo, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
    “Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match.
    What the fuck did he think the Obama staffers were doing? And if Romney's staff and volunteers weren't creating one-to-one contact with voters (also known as "door knocking" and "phone banking"), what the hell were they doing? (Alan: The complete ineptness of the Romney campaign deepens my belief that rich people are not smart but ruthless, fortunate, obsessive, or some combination of the three. Wide-ranging, comprehensive intelligence has very little to do with it, and in many cases, is probably an obstacle to the accumulation of wealth. Chesterton put it well: "The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims. There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/chesterton-quotations.html)
    And why didn't the Romney campaign have the staff to match? Team Red had more money than Obama, and Romney ended the election with $12 million in the bank because they had run out of places to spend money! Perhaps if they hadn't spent $100 million more than the Obama campaign on advertising, but got maybe 20 percent of the spots, they might've had some cash left over to, you know, reach out to voters ...
    ... which is the only reason a campaign exists for in the first place.

    ***

    It has only recently come to light that the Republican Party is not the party of fiscal responsibility but The Party of Economic Catastrophe. See: “Republican Rule and Economic Catastrophe: A Lockstep Relationship” - http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/05/republican-rule-and-economic.html

    The "new thing under the sun" is that Republicans have become inept nitwits who specialize in ideological yarn-spinning heavily larded with rank mendacity. See: “The embarrassing internal GOP polling that showed Mitt Romney winning the election” http://theweek.com/article/index/237161/the-embarrassing-internal-gop-polling-that-showed-mitt-romney-winning-the-election