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Admin Obama campaign tech infrastructure made Romney look lame
Amazon Web Services and the cloud allowed the Obama campaign to focus on building applications rather than maintaining infrastructure
The Obama campaign used open source and the cloud to build a highly efficient powerhouse tech infrastructure. It was done in-house too, not outsourced, which gave them more control. They hired the best and the brightest, with good results. The online fundraising module, for example, was bulletproof – hardened, massively redundant, not dependent on other modules, and designed to keep operating even if its own database failed.
By contrast, the Romney campaign outsourced everything and the idiots in charge didn’t even test the system to track voters. Instead it went live at 6 AM on Election Day and unsurprisingly crashed spectacularly. Romney boasted about being a businessman who could get things done yet his own tech infrastructure was ineptly planned and executed, making numskull rookie mistakes.
Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign’s IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linux—particularly Ubuntu—was used as the server operating system of choice. “We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose,” VanDenPlas said. “Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js.”
It also helped that the campaign, at least for internally developed applications, relied almost exclusively on Amazon Web Service for its infrastructure.
Using the Amazon cloud had huge advantages. The services are metered, you only pay for what you use, with no monthly fees. Servers scale instantly to meet any load. Plus, the campaign didn’t have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure because Amazon was doing it for them and thus could concentrate on building applications.
Emphasis added:
“This is the difference,” VanDenPlas said, “between a well run professional machine and a gaggle of amateurs, posing in true Rumsfeldian fashion, who ‘don’t know what they don’t know.’ I would be shocked if such a chasm exists next cycle between the parties—these aren’t mistakes to be repeated if you want to do things like win elections.”
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Romney ORCA failure shows ineptness of campaign
The abject failure of ORCA, the online Romney campaign tool for tracking votes on election day, highlights how the campaign had no freaking idea what it was doing and was probably arrogantly overconfident as well. Romney wanted to run the country when his campaign couldn’t even manage to put a working piece of software online? Gimme a break…
ORCA could not have been tested. It was dumped on thousands of poll watchers and volunteers on election day with little explanation, no contingency plans or backup systems, and it mostly failed. This is beyond a rookie mistake. It shows the Romney campaign were ignoramuses about online systems and the need for testing and that no one with any actual competence was in charge of the project. Further, it appears that a primary reason for its failure was vicious internal fights between the various consultants and staffers. Romney championed himself as a seasoned and experienced businessman yet his campaign , which certainly should be run like a business, failed spectacularly in any number of areas.
I develop accounting packages for businesses, specializing in converting legacy Clipper and FoxPro to Windows. A client is about to go live with a replacement accounting package I wrote that will do all their accounting and invoicing. We’ve been testing and refining it for weeks in a work environment. It’s ready to go.
My client and I have done extensive testing. The Romney campaign clearly did none for ORCA. It blew up in their faces and showed them to be, despite all their bluster about knowing how to run businesses, not much more than an incompetent clown show.
You can use ORCA to figure out which employees you’re supposed to fire.
— David Waldman (@KagroX) November 12, 2012
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Romney poll watcher on their Election Day failures and meltdowns
Credit: plunderbund
A Romney poll watcher details the near catastrophic level of disorganization on election day when an online and centralized system of checking who voted failed massively and clearly had not been tested.
The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA
What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:
“Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.”
Pretty much everything in that sentence is false
Not only did the online system not work, poll watchers received no information about where to get their poll watcher certificates, which meant they could not legally watch at the polls. Team Romney said ORCA was an app, which caused many to look for it in app stores. But it was a website, not an app. Worse, the http: address of the website didn’t forward to the https: address so many thought the website was non-functional.
Plunderbund agrees.
Combine this failure [of ORCA] with the campaign’s unorthodox choice of holding rallies in Ohio and Pennsylvania on election day, taking hundreds, if not thousands, of staff and volunteers away from vital GOTV activities, it’s clear many of Team Romney’s wounds were self-inflicted.
I can’t help but contrast this to ’92 when I was a Clinton precinct captain in Los Angeles. Organizers said poll workers would have an updated list of who had voted every hour or so, that we could read it, and to call if they refused to let us.
One of my precincts refused to let me read the list. I called the number. They had a lawyer there in 15 minutes and I got to read the list.
In contrast to the apparently bumbling Romney campaign, Obama had well-organized voter registration drives in African-American areas through barber shops and beauty salons, church members, and more. Did Romney even attempt anything like this?
The apparent almost complete failure by Team Romney to get out the vote on Election Day shows a campaign that didn’t really understand the internet and technology. They rushed a crucial website out with no testing and little or no explanation of how poll watchers, some who were probably in their seventies and eighties, were to use it, and had no backup plan or help available when it began to fail.
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Romney lies about Chrysler, GM – gets kneecapped in return
When the presidential candidates are calling each other liars or something close to that, that’s hardly new – but a major American corporation all but calling a presidential candidate a liar, when did that happen before? Never mind happening twice. In one week. Romney lies is their clear message.
Widespread coverage of the story of the Chrysler Corporation’s flat contradiction of Mitt Romney’s campaign assertions, followed by General Motors doing the same, suggests that such sharp corporate responses are unprecedented. Certainly the relationship of these corporations to the Republican Party are far removed from the time when one of President Eisenhower’s cabinet members said that “for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa” (although the urban legend version has him saying “what’s good for General Motors is good for America”).
The catalyst for these sharp corporate reactions came on October 25, in Defiance, Ohio, when Mitt Romney told a campaign rally: “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.” [emphasis added]
Romney’s Comment Was Not True
That was not true. The Bloomberg story stated: “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. [Chrysler] referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.” [emphasis added]
Chrysler executive Gualberto Ranieri responded promptly to Romney campaign comment with a blog statement that used italics for emphasis: “Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China…. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.”
Ranieri called Romney’s conclusion “a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.” Romney neither responded not retracted the comment.
On October 28, the Romney campaign came out with a television ad that kept pushing the story, with more carefullycrafted language, but continued controversy. Firedoglake reported that the ad is “ so false that, as you can see by the title of the video, it’s posted on youtube by people opposed to Romney.”
Chrysler’s CEO Objected At Length
Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne went public on October 30 in a lengthy email that began: “Chrysler Group’s production plans for the Jeep brand have become the focus of public debate. I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China….” [emphasis added]
After mentioning specifics of Chrysler’s production infrastructure, Marchionne concluded his email by saying: “Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand. It is inaccurate to suggest anything different….” [emphasis added]
Romney and his campaign have declined to discuss the Jeep statement on the record, despite repeated questionsfrom reporters. Romney continued making variations of his initial claim in stump speeches, and his campaign issued a radio ad that went further, and claimed General Motors (GM) was also shipping jobs to China: “Under President Obama, GM cut 15,000 American jobs, but they are planning to double the number of cars built in China, which means 15,000 more jobs for China. And now comes word that Chrysler plans to start making Jeeps in, you guessed it, China.”
“The ad is cynical campaign politics at its worst,” said General Motors spokesman Greg Martin: “We think creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back in this country should be a source of bipartisan pride.” [emphasis added]
GM said: “Campaign Politics at its Cynical Worst”
GM spokesman Martin also said: “We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”
By October 31, the Denver Post joined other newspapers around the country, including the Toledo Blade, the Cleveland Leader, the Youngstown Vindicator and two Detroit papers criticizing Romney for “falsehoods and half-truths” (Denver), “blatant lies” (Cleveland), and “[making] things up out of whole cloth” (Youngstown). FactCheck.orgcalled Romney “flat wrong” in his original comment on Jeep going to China, while the National Legal and PolicyCenter (NLPC — which “promotes ethics in public life”) argued that Romney was right and the media are biased.
Although NLPC quotes an ambiguous section from the original Bloomberg story to bolster its argument, it goes on to omit the Bloomberg clarification later in the same story about “adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”
According to Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank on October 31:
“It’s difficult to quantify a candidate’s relationship with the facts, but The Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, has calculated that, for much of the campaign, Romney and Obama were roughly even in their prevarications until the past few months. Back in May, Romney’s average “Pinocchio” rating from Kessler was 1.97 on a scale of 0 to 4. Obama was at 1.91. Now, Obama is at 2.11 and Romney is at 2.40 — putting him at the level of hogwash perpetrated during the primaries by Rick Perry (2.41) and Newt Gingrich (2.44)…. Romney is in a whole new category…. When is comes to truth, Romney still lives in Defiance.”
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