Still not done with the schadenfreude
By It’s been almost seven weeks since the 2012 general election, but I have yet to grow weary of tales from the Romney campaign:
Rich Beeson, the Romney political director who coauthored the now-discredited Ohio memo, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match.
I’d be fascinated to learn what Beeson thought all those people were doing prior election day. Anyone who paid any attention whatsoever to the 2008 presidential campaign should have had a pretty clear idea what was going on, and it’s not like the Obama campaign was keeping this a secret.
This has got me thinking about an additional danger for presidential campaigns in general and Republican presidential campaigns in particular. Insofar as corporate culture increasingly revolves around the practice of removing wealth from companies and placing it in the hands of <s>their co-conspirators</s> “job creators” at the expense of employees, consumers, small shareholders, and the general public, and Republican leadership and support becomes increasingly tied to this social class, there’s a danger they’ll bring their corporate model to political campaigns, which will surely be to their detriment.
Obama’s campaign treated their task as work, and hired thousands of people to do a fairly simple, straightforward job. That Romney’s people view this strategy as alien to their understanding of the process of campaigning, speaks volumes.