How Team Romney harnessed the white heat of technology to secure the Presidency

[james_davis_nicoll]

If only the election had gone the other way, all of America could be run this well.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

That is not the software that John Galt would develop.

[emceeaich]

John Galt thinks Software As A Service is something for Collectivist Parasites.

[azurelunatic]

The enormous reduction in size when John Galt's programs compile is because the compiler removes the comments.

[aberrantangels]

...will that internets be carry-out or delivery?

[vass]

My neighbours are probably wondering what that high-pitched yapping noise is. It is my uncontrollable laughter.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Others couldn't connect to the Orca site because they entered the URL for the site without the https:// prefix; instead of being redirected to the secure site, they were confronted with a blank page...

...it wasn't until 6:00 PM on Election Day that the team running Orca admitted they had issued the wrong PIN codes and passwords to everyone in [Colorado and North Carolina]...

...and, from the linked Ace of Spades article, Team Romney failed to tell its volunteers they needed a poll watcher's certificate, apparently through not proofreading its instructions.

I mean, gosh. I know I'm supposed to point and laugh, but the part of me that values competence for its own sake just died a little. And I was going to make a joke along the lines of "If they want some more competent help, I've got some undergrads that could do better," but then I remembered that the previous Republican administration staffed the Iraq occupation with pretty much that strategy.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

When you have Republican officials seriously using phrases like "the reality based community" as an insult and valuing ideological purity over skill or ability, your going to see idiocy like that. Also, it strikes that that this less seems like a real-life demonstration of the utility of the idea that all you need to succeed is the proper amount of will and determination.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I don't blame this on the general Republican lunacy. I blame this on Romney, specifically: he is a Business Manager (TM) of the type who makes high-level decisions, gives vague instructions and does not follow through to see how they're going. Which leads to exactly this mode of failure.

When I first started hearing ORCA stories it was uncanny how familiar it was...

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

It does seem like a Dilbert storyline, doesn't it?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I was hoping Romney would read/say "I have broccoli in my pants" during his concession speech.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I agree it's the specific fault of the campaign Romney ran, but it is true that the current Republican party has been pursuing this management strategy for a while. As a friend of mine said about the Bush administration at the time, it's MBA's all the way down.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I think they misnamed that app. Beluga would have been a more appropriate name.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Nah. If there's a specific name for those masses of blubber that sometimes get washed onto beaches and mistaken for crypto-horrors from the abyss, that's what they should've gone with.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Partisan snark aside, there are so many stories like that in both private and public sectors. I recently finished a four-year stint at the Project Management Institute; although I've never been a manager, let alone a project manager, I tried to learn as much as I could. One of the sharpest observers of the field is Bent Flyvbjerg, who did superb analysis of cost and schedule overruns in big infrastructure projects. More recently, his group has been doing the same for IT projects like Orca -- and oh my, it's not a pretty picture.