The funniest thing about Mark Thiessen’s piece is that he is mystified that a “community organizer” could out-organize a Bain Capital outsourcer. But what could be more predictable?
How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?
Mitt Romney was not the cool candidate. He ran on competence. But having the data system your campaign is relying on to turn out the vote crash on Election Day is incompetent. Not testing that system before Election Day is inexcusable. And letting a community organizer run a more precise, data-driven, metrics-based campaign than a Bain Capital executive is incomprehensible.
There is nothing incomprehensible about it. President Obama hired people who believe in science. President Obama’s team used trial and error to hone the best possible practices. President Obama is a trained organizer which means he is very good at organizing people.
Mitt Romney is an expert at hiring people to cut corners and find loopholes in the law and hide large amounts of money and to loot pension funds. He is trained to deceive and defraud people, and to cheat and steal. He designs and exploits systems that are rigged so that he cannot lose. He doesn’t organize people. He fleeces them. He’s a con man. Just ask his billionaire supporters.
I will be forever mystified by people on the right who have convinced themselves that Obama is an empty suit who would be easy to beat in 2008 and even easier to beat in 2012. Clueless.
I can understand 2008, he WAS an unknown. The takeaway from the primaries should have been that this unknown beat into the dirt the wife of Satan himself. But then, good Xtians know all about beating Satan.
But I cannot understand 2012, except in terms of: they believed their own press. The RightWing is not cynical enough. if they were, they might have had a better chance.
Beat into the dirt?
First off, I believe it’s beat into the mud. And second, I wouldn’t call it that.
I think I can understand it: Thiessen, et al, have no experience of community organizing. If you have no experience of community organizing, if you don’t know people (like Barack Obama) who spent a few years organizing and then moved on with their lives, then it’s not too surprising that you don’t have a clue about the skills and habits of mind that organizing requires and develops.
I recall watching Obama’s 2008 nomination acceptance in Denver and realizing halfway through the evening that much of the event was structured like a public action meeting he would have organized in a church on the South Side in the mid-1980s.
The “universals of public life” that Obama learned about when working for Gamaliel really are “universals”. They work on a campaign to get the city to repair a decrepit school building; they work on a campaign to elect the president of the United States.
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I completely agree. Only addition I would make, first Mitt was bailed out by blood money as start capital and as CEO he relied on the best head hunters, lawyers and tax people qualified to make exorbitant “return on investment” by not paying taxes. I’m doing a write-up about multinationals and OECD report: Taxes, Transfer Pricing, and the Multimational Enterprise [small pdf].
LEGAL: Four More Years – The Enforcement Outlook
Well, I find Thiessen’s column hilarious. It just shows how truly clueless the so much of the right is when it comes to understanding how to use empirical evidence and analytics to their advantage. You know……that snobby and elitist stuff called science.
The GOP is kind of like the gorilla in that old Samsonite luggage commercial. The one where he throws the luggage all around, stomps on and tries to break it open. After many tries the GOP gorilla determines that, by god, this thing just cannot be opened. It is secure as it can be. It is bulletproof. So, in their usual cocksure way, they toss it toward the Obama team. Which then proceeds, not to try and break it open, but to dial up the combination on the lock, simply open it and steal all the GOP’s goodies; as the GOP stands there in shocked amazement. No brawn required to beat them, only brains.
Well, I think Romny, Rove and Priebus don’t have brawn either. I doubt they have never lifted more than three binders in their lives and they don;t stay long in a room where work is happening either.
I doubt they have never lifted more than three binders in their lives and they don;t stay long in a room where work is happening either.
It depends on if you think lifting glasses full of cognac is considered work.
When someone uses the label “community organizer” for Obama it is usually a tell that this person is a wingnut, unless it is a specific discussion about his career history.
The equivalent would be to refer to Mitt Romney today as a Mormon missionary as though that is all he’s ever been.
But as we’ve all been pointing out these “captains of industry” aren’t actually good at building things or making them efficient – they are good at using large sums of money to game the system in their favor. For them it’s like they are playing in a magical casino where they literally cannot lose money and imagining that it’s because they are brilliant gamblers. In such a situation they develop a lot of bad habits that are immediately exposed when they have to play in a real casino.
Barack Hussein Obama II has beaten their asses TWICE now…
and, they still sneer ‘ Community Organizer’.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA AH HA HA
It’s funny you mention the middle name. On Wednesday morning I had a very very early flight to San Fran … the only Colorado Springs nonstop to San Fran is at the crack of dawn. So, except for all the grim faces of the people at the airport (heh heh … except for the TSA and maintenance workers) and the CNBC kiosk with their money gurus whining about how dark skinned people stole the election from the real Americans, I didn’t get much local reaction to the election.
When I get to SFO everyone seemed perkier, of course. As I settled in for my bumper-to-bumper trip down 101 (traffic has gotten a lot worse in SF Bay compared to this time last year – jobs probably are up) I uncharacteristically cruised some local radio stations.
Which reminds me of the president’s full name – Barak Hussein Obama. You see, even the SF Bay has it’s full complement of extremist hate radio stations and I know because I heard that full name … SPIT out syllable by syllable … on 3 of them that morning. Man were they angry. Not a rational thought to be heard.
Eventually I found Democracy Now and listened the rest of the way to work.
Imagine the cost of his incompetence if Rmoney had been elected.
I can’t go there. My mind shies away in terror every time I try.
They know money. Financing, taxes, investment strategies, and so on.
I’ve worked for corporations owned by private equity firms (as investments) before. While there are usually a few informed people on the boards created by the investment firms, there are also a lot of “deal makers” who only understand money and have never actually built, managed, or invented anything worth talking about their entire lives. The useful people inevitably come from other businesses (manufacturing, IT, and so on), and that’s where they get their skills.
Anyone who has only working in private equity investment has one skill, and one skill only. And it ain’t running things efficiently.
Bain wasn’t a large company, either. Running a small company, particularly a small investment firm, doesn’t teach you squat about managing an actual business. The rest of your employees in the investment firm are money-heads as well.
I’ve never understood the whole “Romney is a businessman, and gets the economy!” thought pattern. Anyone who has actually dealt with these one-trick ponies would know what they’re truly good for.
Shit
Herman Cain actually had far more experience actually mobilizing people to create value and a sustaining business.
Anyone who has been paying attention would have realized that Obama won because his team won. And his team won because they believed in him, so it was a reciprocal effort. These campaign teams could not have been more different, and they reflected their leaders quite clearly.
Obama’s team: organized, disciplined, tech-savvy, and open to different tactics and plans for a solid ground game.
Romney’s team: chaotic, clueless, tech-tarded, and fixed on the old fashioned brochure-bombs that waste time and money.
These political hacks who claim to not understand what happened and why are simply full of shit. They’re embarrassed and angry about losing, so they’re floundering for reasons.
Here’s a reason: you all sucked. Your arrogant candidate sucked. Your filthy rich donors sucked. Your campaign sucked.
See, that’s not so hard to figure out!
Here is why Obama won: The Five Essential Elements of Leadership.
Relationship: Continuously focus on the connection people have with other people. Everything gets done with, for and around other people. Customers, co-workers, voters, competition, etc. Those relationships everything about how, even if that happens.
Future: The past is the past. We have no control over it. But we do have a great amount of influence in the here and now about what the future looks like. Any second we spend focused on the past or waiting for the future is a second that has no influence over the future.
Learning: Great leaders admit what they don’t know. They show it is OK to be vulnerable and admit mistakes… so long as it is also paired with a thirst for learning and discovering the truly best answers. Great leaders model this for their organizations but also hold people accountable for humility and learning.
Power: Great leaders gain their power by giving it away. The power they give to others has a multiplying effect. Any army is going to be more powerful than any king.
Conflict: Great leaders understand conflict should be a good and positive thing. If the organization is aligned behind a common purpose then any conflict is only about how best to achieve it. It is about removing things that are getting in the way of the team operating as well as it it wants to.
Watch Obama address to the campaign staff on 08 or this year and you will see each of these traits played out clearly.
Watch how he handled the attack on Bin Laden or many other issues, and you will see it there too.
But he mostly won IMO because 53% of the American people see it all the time too and respond well to it. The economy may suck and he may not have done everything they want but they see something they see as great leadership.
In Mitt they saw a guy who could talk to investors and bankers and read a balance sheet. They saw a guy who could dispassionately “do the right thing” for his investors, but not someone who could confidently lead others to achieve more and better than they could do separately.
How much did Sheldon Aldeson set afire this year’s election?
“He designs and exploits systems that are rigged so that he cannot lose.”
Yes, rigged systems like U.S. elections, particularly in places like Florida. Thank God it didn’t work this time.
That’s an interesting column. It reminds me about how in 2008 all the talking heads never got how the campaign worked with the amazing number of house parties and face to face canvassing that occurred in 2008 (and then also this year).
It’s always got to be about the technology. Never human power, never the human connection, never the human touch.
I’m not minimizing the role and power of the tools OFS used. They’re great. But they are still just tools and worth little if there isn’t a good strategy to which the tools are applied. (I’m a 25 year IT guy.)
It’s interesting what it assumes about Romney too. So naive! Thinking a vulture capitalist like Romney is going to help the US because of business skills is like thinking your chiropractor is automatically qualified to do brain surgery on you.
Whenever I read something written by someone who doesn’t understand community organizing I’m reminded of Obama’s oft quoted comment in 1995 when he was thinking about his organizing experience and how it might fit politics:
“What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer?”
Sources:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/what-makes-obama-run/Content?oid=889221
http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/149/obama.html
The thing about our OFA campaign was the way technology was developed to help us with our relationship based organizing.
There were many tools that were developed because we told our field organizers and directors that we needed something. And the development of better tools has been taking place since 2009-with weekly webinars to teach the team leaders who then teach their teams.
I really, really want autofill the next time out;-)
If Thiessen didn’t notice that Obama ran on competence too — competence he demonstrated as President — then he wasn’t paying attention.
This. Double this.
Our friend Mark (and most of the other wingnut commentators) are also leaving out a key data point. That community organizer ran what many people considered the best, most efficient and well-organized presidential campaign in history (to date) in 2008. There was absolutely no reason people on the right should have assumed he’d lost those skills; they simply whitewashed that part of his history from their memory, preferring instead to focus on Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, and whatever microscandals they could dial up or invent from his first term.
Nobody has to respect “community organizer” if they’re willing instead to respect the job Obama did as CEO of his campaign for president – itself a very large, organizationally complex (much more so that running Bain) endeavor. But Kenyans can’t run something that well organized. Neither can socialists. And neither, by definition, can black people. So they pretended it never happened, and now they’re all mystified that it happened again.
That’s the problem with living in an alternate universe. The real one doesn’t go away.
even the freepi are starting to get it:
Ruy and Texiera have pointed out that most technical people including IT are progressive. I never realized it because the conservatives are so loud. The progressives are quiet, but numerous. So Obama had competent even inspired IT and Romney had, what? The cheapest IT he could buy?
In short, authoritarians only understand a hierarchy, where you never have to be aware of anything more than the guys right above and below you. Community organizers, as most progressives, know that you need to create a broad based coalition to succeed.