Romney the Great Manager? Not Nearly as Good as Obama, the Election Proved

In the days since the election we have learned that President Barack Obama‘s campaign had an amazingly advanced and disciplined ground game that knew just what precincts and even voters to target and how to target them, based on polling information that predicted how the vote was going with uncanny precision. Yet Mitt Romney was the man running as the experienced manager, the man whose years running a business uniquely qualified him to run the biggest, most complex organization on earth, the federal government. That was his main, most consistent claim to the office. Now it looks more as if, though he may have been very good at buying and selling companies and extracting profit from them, he wasn’t nearly as good at heading an effective complex organization as President Obama.

As a commenter on Andrew Sullivan’s blog summed it up,

    Obama executed quantifiable long-term plans, adaptable short-term planning, an innovative GOTV initiative and plotted better ad strategies, while Romney had the ORCA trainwreck [see below], inaccurate internal polling, poorly informed managers and insufficient fiscal planning (e.g. coffers too low in July to react to the Obama ad blitz seems so minor league!).  Not to mention its upper management was rewarded with bonuses in September, right after the languid convention and the embarrassing European trip. Read more...