In the post-election analysis I keep seeing this meme that Romney was a numbers guy, and so the punditry was surprised that his campaign was so unprepared to lose the vote. Consider, for example, the final paragraph of this article in Slate:
In the final 10 days of the race, a split started to emerge in the two campaigns. The Obama team would shower you with a flurry of data–specific, measurable, and they’d show you the way they did the math. Any request for written proof was immediately filled. They knew their brief so well you could imagine Romney hiring them to work at Bain. The Romney team, by contrast, was much more gauzy, reluctant to share numbers, and relying on talking points rather than data. This could have been a difference in approach, but it suggested a lack of rigor in the Romney camp. On Election Day, the whole Romney ground-game flopped apart. ORCA, the much touted- computer system for tracking voters on Election Day, collapsed. It was supposed to be a high-tech approach to poll-watching, a system by which campaign workers would be able to track who voted. Those who had not yet voted could therefore be identified and then have volunteers tasked to finding them and getting them to the polls. ORCA was supposed to streamline the process, but it was never stress-tested. Field operatives never saw a beta version. They asked to see it, but were told it would be ready on Election Day. When they rolled it out Tuesday, it was a mess. People couldn’t log on and when they did, the fields that were supposed to be full of data were empty. “I saw a zero and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be seeing a zero,” said one campaign worker. A war room had been set up in the Boston Garden to monitor ORCA’s results, but in the end Romney and Ryan had to watch CNN to find out how their campaign was doing. In the end, the numbers guy was deprived of his numbers in more ways than one.
Look, I am a numbers guy. I do TONS of data processing for business analytics in my current job. And I’ll tell you Romney is no more a numbers guy than Ryan is a policy wonk … they both just play those roles on TV.
Yeah, Ryan pulls out 4 power point slides with some Excel charts and the journalism majors who got a “C” in remedial math swoon. Romney spouts off a few numbers he’s memorized and they do likewise. When this happens it’s the blind leading the blind.
First, let’s understand modern business … and I’m DEFINITELY including Private Equity (PE) firms like Bain in this. By the time the PE bosses see the numbers they have been so reviewed, pruned, massaged, and edited that they NEVER expose any real problems that the people presenting the numbers don’t want to expose. The big wigs love to come in, make a couple observations that they imagine everyone around them reacts to with awed admiration but in fact are the observations we set them up to make, then slap each other on the back and head off to margaritas at the JW Marriott or United Red Carpet Club. After the deal is done if they are lucky they have a few really competent people who can manage the merger, acquisition, spin-off, or whatever it is they agreed to do to a successful conclusion. If they have to bring in their own “little people” to manage the details it may go well if those little people are strong and have very similar experience in the same industry … if not it’s usually going to be one of those bad deals they talk about later.
Of COURSE Romney was fooled by the numbers … and I guarantee he’s been fooled scores of times before. Only this time he didn’t have the upper class monetary buffer to insulate himself from his ignorance. This time his ignorance and resulting bad decisions impacted him directly. Which is why he, and Ryan, and their wives, and their campaign staff, were so shocked on election night. In the business world they screw up, layoff 10x the people they planned, lose money, and still get a personal bonus. They tell themselves that it was someone else’s fault. This time they actually paid the price themselves. What a concept.