Friday, June 7, 2013

Romney Revisionism

I don't know if he thinks lying makes it better, or if he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Generally, I follow Hanlon's Razor, and try not to attribute to malice what can just as easily be explained by stupidity, but either one seems plausible at this point.

Talking about what went wrong, Romney said they didn't get the turnout from minority voters that they needed and he acknowledged his campaign was outmatched by his opponent's massive organization.

"I think he had as many as 10 times the number of ground workers, paid staff, that we had, because he could afford them and we couldn't," he said.

Uh, Romney's campaign directly spent over $480 million. I'm pretty sure they could have afforded a better field program than the one they actually built.

The Obama campaign had more ground workers and paid staff because they managed their funds a lot better than Romney did and prioritized their field and data programs higher than Romney's. Mitt squandered a fortune on consultant fees and wildly mis-targeted his media buys, which wasted millions of dollars that could have gone to build a more competent field program.

He also came off as a self-important, dishonest, uncaring jerk, which might have had some impact on his low-dollar fundraising efforts. But either way, he could easily have afforded a better campaign, he just didn't have the skill to build one.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Chris Christie knows what he's doing

Calling for a special election in October, when there's already going to be a general election in November, is an expensive hassle that will annoy voters and pundits alike. That's probably the best that Christie could have hoped for. The worst-case scenario for him would be going up against the Cory Booker GOTV machine, simply because the biggest obstacle to his reelection is the likelihood that Democrats will simply mob the polls in this off-year election.

When you look at it that way, it's worth $24 million to Christie to call for an October vote. It's terrible financial stewardship for crass political purposes, but they're really important crass political purposes.

Just when you thought racism couldn't get any more racismer

Kinda makes me wanna sing a verse of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." But not in the happy way:

Who would have thought that breakfast cereal would trigger the latest racial battle line? In this case, a Cheerios ad much like every other homespun Cheerios ad — with a heart healthy message and loving family – ran into trouble from some commenters because of the kind of family it featured. Mom is white, dad is black and their cute little daughter is a mix of the both of them.

That’s it.

Cheerios had to disable comments on YouTube – I’m not going to repeat them but you can imagine the general witless racism with stereotypes about minorities and warnings of race-mixing as the end of civilization. Late Friday night, after a day of widespread news coverage, the ad had more than 8,400 thumbs-up votes on YouTube, versus about 900 thumbs-down.

If your conception of the American state or your core convictions can be shaken by a commercial for bland cereal, you've got bigger problems to worry about.

And you're also an asshole.