During the campaign this year I must be honest and say it was often impossible to know where downright denial ends and total BS begins. Clearly if one is to win, it is necessary to be optimistic and talk up one\'s chances. But there are limits.
A case in point. Despite the Romney campaign boasting about its epic get out the vote (GOTV) efforts, it seems the entire thing was a total disaster (and predictably so). Watch this fascinating clip, just prior to the election on PBS Newshour. The Romney campaign boasts about its historic GOTV technology. Then laugh like a drain. Romney\'s Orca project fell over spectacularly.....
It was an \"unmitigated disaster\" says one supporter, The Ace of Spaces. More fascinating still are the 600 comments to his post which explain how 30,000 of the most active Romney volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated on election day.
One writes \"the bitter irony of this entire endevour was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favour of a centralised, faceless organisation in a far off place (in this case their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that\".
Another writes, \"I\'d say this was a world class clusterfuck. That\'s a technical term, btw.\"
And another, \"In the most GOP precinct in my city. Voted at 6AM. Got phone calls all day reminding me to vote. Got the last call at 6:59PM. The polls closed at 7PM. Clusterfuck.\"
Presumably all the bragging about superior technology was designed to keep the donors happy. If so, this is not the only area in which Republicans have been fleeced according to a clip from Morning Joe, where the conservative columnist David Frum explains how Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.
That is a pretty big idea by itself. In other words that by insulating itself from the mainstream media and within an ecosystem that is little more than a conservative echo-chamber, that the right was unable to see what was really coming or have any real context. (We saw some of this in attacks on the statistician Nate Silver.)
It is one thing to ask whether, after all the money that has been spent, it was wasted given that a campaign has lost. There will always be a sense of money wasted on the losing side. But it is quite another to have a creeping concern that the right-wing media, political consultants, and contractors have had one priority alone: to milk Obama terror for all it is worth.