Political Irony

I had to think about this post for a while. Part of me wanted to post it because I work with computers for a living. Part of me wanted to post it because I’m friends with some of the people who wrote the original Obama campaign mobile application back in 2008 (which was very successful). So I’m definitely biased.

But the account of how the Romney campaign completely bungled their “get out the vote” app goes beyond technical issues. Was their app doomed to fail because it reflects a world-view that is becoming a dinosaur, not to mention rife with irony and hypocrisy?

And fail it did. Users were emailed 60-page PDF files to print out. Seriously. Users had not been given any training and were not allowed to use or learn the app before the election. On election day, the website was largely inaccessible because they only put it on a single server. Even users who could get to the app found that they had been given the wrong PIN codes and passwords. When that was cleared up, the servers started crashing. And especially ironic, with all the users trying frantically to access the servers, the campaign’s ISP (Comcast) shut down their network connection because they thought it was a “denial of service” attack. When volunteers couldn’t access the app they had no way to help get out the vote, so they had no choice but to give up and go home. There was no plan B.

One of the developers of the Romney app put it well:

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

The Romney app’s world-view reflects the top-down, hierarchically regimented, centralized world view of the CEO, versus Obama’s decentralized, bottom-up, grassroots world view of the social networker or community organizer. It is central control versus local control. It is authoritarianism versus peer networking. It is automation versus human factors, homogeneity versus heterogeneity. In every way I can think of the latter is more powerful, more democratic, more capitalistic (in the real sense of the word), and reflects the things that have made the US the greatest country on earth.

It is also ironic that the businessman’s campaign miserably failed in one of their most business-centric tasks — marketing and sales. So even if you believe we need a more business-like approach in our government, maybe Romney just isn’t a very good businessman.

UPDATE: Interesting stories on how Obama won the election — using sophisticated data mining and analytics — and how this is making old-school pundits obsolete.

[Our favorite senior citizens Margaret and Helen had this post on their blog two days after the election.]

Margaret, I ventured into new territory today. I tuned into Fox News. It was kind of like going to the zoo… not so scary once you learn the animals can’t get out of their cages.

Just like when I go to a regular zoo, I didn’t know the names of all the animals at Fox, but I quickly learned the ones with opposable thumbs and the ability to reason were token Democrats who had, at some point, worked in the Clinton administration. The ones who liked to rattle their cages and screech at the visitors were the angry Republican hacks who seemed to be, for the first time, discovering the wonders of math.

I was surprised to see so many animals that I thought were long ago extinct. There was angry, old Lou Dobbs plodding around mumbling something about voter fraud and immigrants and Mike Huckabee being all folksy and jolly. And there was Oliver North, Liz Cheney, Haley Barbour and even Geraldo Rivera who now just goes by Geraldo like Madonna, Cher and Cavuto.

Over in a corner in a cage all by himself was the red-assed Karl Rove. Now that one scares me. When they called Ohio for Obama I heard he started flinging pooh and screaming about recounts and faulty polls.

I got a chance to spot the elusive big-footed Ann Coulter which was thrilling. Since her visit to The View, she only makes appearances when no other women are in the room. She seemed pretty at ease in the zoo. I guess that comes from all the time she spent collaborating with monkeys on those personal therapy projects she calls books. Ann seemed remarkably calm considering not only the election results but also the colossal failure that was her last book. Usually she’s shrill and fidgety but sitting there in the cage with Sean Hannity she seemed almost human.

There was a lovely exhibit of irrelevant talking parrots including Shepard Smith, Greg Gutfeld, Tucker Carlson and Mr.[sic] Van Susteren. I can’t keep all of their names straight but one of them suggested that the majority of voters are like abused housewives who voted to stay with their abuser. Most of them were squawking about Hurricane Sandy and that America was about to go over a cliff. As expected, they blamed the liberal media for handing the election to Obama while simultaneously chirping that Fox is the most watched news broadcast in the nation. I know. I know. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense but it’s Fox News. It doesn’t have to. While I don’t think they understand the difference between Mexican-Americans and Cuban-Americans, they seem to think that any Republican politician with a name ending in O or Z will need to be on the bottom half of the ticket in 2016 if Republicans are to take the White House back.

Every zoo has its specialty and Fox is no exception. They have the largest collection of blonde, bulemic middle school girls posing as reporters with names like Megyn, Gretchen, Cheryl and Dana… many of them openly wept as the election results came in causing a river of mascara that got all over everything.

But the real treat came when I ran across that rare but ever-lovable snow beast, Sarah Palin. She’s a bit older but still very capable of smacking her lips while rattling off those non-sensical run-on sentences like “this election if it continues the way it is going will be a catastrophic setback to our economy and to any opportunity that we would have for Supreme Court justices to be appointed who would be strict adherents to the traditional interpretation of what our Constitution says which is a blueprint towards a more perfect union.” Isn’t she precious? Honestly, I was surprised to see that she had actually survived the end-of-days calamity known as the 2008 election.

Now Margaret, I don’t suggest that you visit the Fox Zoo. The lighting is bad, the air is thin, and reality is in short supply. They haven’t cleaned the cages in years so the bullshit is everywhere. Instead let me visit occasionally and send back reports. Trust me. It’s better that way.

Unlike the zoo, trips to Fox News should probably be few and far between. I mean it. Really.

Interviews with Romney supporters at a rally in Defiance, Ohio:

Because these people live in Ohio, their votes were expected to be some of the most important in deciding the election. Scary.

Obama gets emotional while thanking his campaign staff:

There were a number of ballot measures in the recent election that asked people if they wanted to see the Citizens United Supreme Court decision overturned. And the results are that over seven million people said that corporations are not people and money is not free speech.

The state of Montana passed initiative I-166 with a 75% landslide, which prohibits corporate contributions or expenditures in elections and directs the state to help pass an amendment to the US constitution overturning Citizens United. What makes this even more interesting is that Mitt Romney carried Montana with 55%, so even die-hard Republicans think Citizens United was a bad decision.

Colorado also passed a similar amendment (with a similar margin), as did more than half of Massachusetts towns and cities, San Francisco and Richmond in California, two cities and a county in Oregon, and Chicago.

Common Cause has created a website “Amend 2012” where you can find out ways to help overturn Citizens United, with the slogan “Only People Are People”.

While around 75% of Americans think Citizens United should be overturned, the 1% are going to spend a lot of money to keep their right to flood elections with (often anonymous) money, annoy people with a deluge of attack ads, and otherwise buy our democracy. We may be burned out on politics, but now is our best chance to do something about this.

© Nick Anderson

After blaming just about everyone in America for our woes (gays, immigrants, women, Democrats, non-whites, …), I guess it would be too much to expect the GOP to do anything other than blame everyone else for their election loss.