I don’t know that I’ve ever recommended reading something at RedState. But this is fascinating — “Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job.” It sounds as if some of the consulting firms working for the Romney campaign were just faking it. The article claims they were running a con job on Romney.
They say that the truth is the consultants essentially used the Romney campaign as a money making scheme, forcing employees to spin false data as truth in order to paint a rosy picture of a successful campaign as a form of job security.
Zac Moffatt, Digital Director for the Romney campaign, was specifically named as having “built a nest egg for himself and co-founder of Targeted Victory, Mike Beach,†and that they “didn’t get social†media and ignored objections from other consultants and staffers in the campaign.
You may have seen some of the criticism of ORCA, a smartphone app that was supposed to be Mitt’s high-tech poll-monitoring system. Apparently it was an epic fail.
Sources also said that arrogance played a big role, saying that the Romney campaign was a hostile battlefield of egos in which these consultants viewed any opposition to their world view as coming from an enemy. This apparently led to the ORCA program “receiving no stress test, no usage during super saturdays and no ability to have a Plan B or C when everything hit the fan.â€
“The brain trust of the Romney campaign was so arrogant that they refused to change strategy. It was clear in June were SOL,†said one email.
Another source that closely studied the Obama campaigns GOTV efforts as compared to ORCA said bluntly that “the Obama training manuals made ORCA look like a drunken monkey slapped together a powerpoint†adding that we must duplicate and improve what they accomplished to have any hope for the 2014 & 2016 ground game.
But the failures in what was described as a “tightly wound consultant culture†didn’t stop there.
Stu Stevens of the Stevens and Schriefer Group was said to not be chasing poll numbers with the media buy strategy and appeared instead to be doing little more than “throwing darts at a dartboard.†At best using false numbers provided by ORCA; at worst milking the cash cow of the Romney campaign.
Can’t you just see it? By the way, we won Florida. See also “The Oracle’s Debacle.”