I'm amused to see Ben Howe at RedState talking about the failure of Mitt Romney's get-out-the-vote operation this way:
Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con JobWhat did we see in the financial crisis? Mortgages being sold to people who clearly couldn't afford them. Terrible mortgages sliced and diced and repackaged as top-quality securities, sold by firms that new how awful those securities were and were betting against them.
...So what caused the breakdown and why didn't it get fixed in time? Well according to sources who worked closely with the program, the blame is at the feet of consultants.
Specifically Targeted Victory, FLS Connect, and The Stevens and Schriefer Group....
They say that the truth is the consultants essentially used the Romney campaign as a money making scheme, forcing employees to spin false data as truth in order to paint a rosy picture of a successful campaign as a form of job security.
Zac Moffatt, Digital Director for the Romney campaign, was specifically named as having "built a nest egg for himself and co-founder of Targeted Victory, Mike Beach" ...
In modern America, this is the spirit of capitalism. It's not Randian-heroic. It's not "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Nobody gives a crap about the mousetrap's ability to catch mice. Nobody takes pride in the quality of the product, even if a well-made product would have been profitable. Pride is derived only from pulling a fast one and cashing in. Capitalism is a zero-sum war.
If you think that way, eventually you're going to screw your own kind, because you can't imagine bothering to make a better product, even when your kind are the clients.
So bravo, American capitalists -- I hope you like the world you've made.
6 comments:
Oh-oh!
Grifting money from RICH rubes usually has some rather serious and dramatic circumstances.
Look at poor Bernie Madoff:
If, in his Ponzi Scheme, he'd stolen upwards of $50 Billion from the poor and middle class, he'd still be having champagne wishes and caviar dreams - and not just at night, in his lonely jail cell.
I can easily see some people disappearing - and not all of them willingly, running away to another country with their gains.
No. This is what capitalism always is. The better mouse trap thingy--that's the market, which has always existed; not capitalism. Capitalism is making money off money. Capitalists want us to confuse the market with capitalism. I wonder why.
Look, should anyone be surprised that the republican party doe not vet consultants any better than VP candidates?
There is really a perfect ironic justice in this. The whole election feels that way to me, in this respect as well as in the Rs' finally buying, and dying by, the same alternate-reality BS ("we're gonna ride momentum & win") that they've been selling to everyone else since 1980.
It's not *just* about not being bothered to make a better product. It's about having to make a product your customers will buy. Back in the mortgage-bubble days, anyone who didn't participate had lower returns, which meant their bosses fired them, or their customers pulled out their money and invested with people who had higher returns.
I'm betting on a similar effect here: produce results showing your client sucks, and watch them order their next set of polls from someone else.
This is perfectly plausible to me. I had a friend leave the Gingrich campaign the very night he won the SC primary -- perhaps the only night in the last four years in which significant numbers of Americans thought Gingrich might have a shot at the White House -- because it had become clear to him that the consultants were lining their pockets at the campaign donors' expense.
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