I had the good fortune of working directly for Ed Derwinski one of the most intelligent and thoughtful politicians America has produced.
Prior to becoming the first Secretary of the Department of Veterans affairs he had served as a ten term Republican Congressman from Chicago, and then Counselor Department of State and then Undersecretary of State for President Reagan.
“Big Ed” often stressed two key points about elections:
- Win some lose some and
- The close ones hurt and will drive the most heated and very personal recriminations.
In the aftermath of the 2012 Presidential election I think of his wise counsel.
It has not taken long for very public recriminations and score settling to begin.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this occurring once all the facts are known and understood.
When Ed Derwinski was in the Illinois House he was also State Chair for Goldwater in 1964. So he earned his wisdom from an historic loss that eventually sixteen years later gave America the great President Reagan.
The most important take away right now is —do not shoot the wounded —until all the facts are in and whose judgement for the future should be appropriately ignored.
It is critical to both learn first what really happened, beside Governor Romney losing, and grow into the future from understanding all the factors of the defeat.
Scores are immediately being settled in public on the future vision of the Republican Party, and demands that the political philosophy of new leaders adhere to very agenda items.
Bold assertions are being made about what groups should be targeted and what messages should be tailored for outreach to build a bigger Republican nationwide tent etc, etc, etc.
An additional factor is that some well paid power players who were totally wrong have been quick to lash out blaming everyone else, this is often a DC character flaw of individuals who have weak but arrogant egos.
My fundamental point is to not forget to look at just the simple “mechanics” of how to win an election.
Independent of any message and platform in the Romney Campaign it is possible that they as a team failed at the very basic level of simply delivering the vote on Election Day.
Get Out The Vote (GOTV) which is the ground game point of any election.
In the 2012 Presidential election there was significant difference on the number of Obama/Democrat (high) and Romney/Republican (low) political GOTV statewide offices.
Personally, I put a lot of faith and confidence that Governor Romney with his devout Mormon faith would truly understand grassroots outreach. In America and world wide Mormons are not cowards in going into both high-end wealthy developments and inner city dodgy neighborhoods while on their mission.
When the Romney team was challenged on the very noticeable difference in the number of field offices -they said essentially “we have the money and if we thought we needed more field offices we would have them.”
That makes sense if they have a well thought out game plan.
They countered about the discrepancy in number of organized statewide offices with a powerful new 21st Century “app”-the technology they called “Orca.”
“For months now, the Romney campaign has been putting together a high-tech voter monitoring
“Orca will deploy 34,000 operatives in key precincts tomorrow, linked by a smartphone “killer app” to 800 volunteers on the floor of TD Garden (formerly Boston Garden). The Romney campaign has tried to keep Orca under wraps until the past few days. But today, Romney for President Communications Director Gail Gitcho proudly described it for us.”
However, the Obama Campaign Team went back to the basics for their 2012 GOTV:
“Four years ago, the Obama campaign assigned each of its likely voters a four digit code that would be messaged to a database by a poll site volunteer after the voter had signed in. The effort overheated and this year the Obama campaign has decided to use a less robust tracking system and divert volunteers to other, more traditional get out the vote efforts.”
Unfortunately for America, team Romney/Ryan had an historic epic failure on their GOTV.
Independent of any fundamental points about and his future vision stressed in Romney’s “air game” in both paid and earned media, the Romney team was giving themselves full credit on being visionary.
They bet the future of America on their successfully pioneering a new approach for the basic “block and tackle” mechanics to build and execute a winning ground game for their GOTV national effort.
Since Candidate Romney’s background was as an executive who understood profoundly how to be a “turnaround” specialist in America’s free market rockem sockem capitalism trusting his judgement of betting the future of America on an untested “App” probably looked like a good bet.
Orca also had the advantage of being developed and employed by a team in Boston, one of the great technology visionary cities in America. So what could go wrong, and remember, Boston is also a famous political city, just read the Last Hurrah.
But they went up against a Chicago Outfit that beat Clinton Inc and are are definitely a politically tested and battle scared political Super Bowl team in their own right.
Sadly, if current evidence from the field now being reported in nationwide blogs is accurate, and it appears that it is, “Orca” failed in Beta Test at the height of the Battle with absolutely NO back-up plan.
Unfortunately for America, team Romney/Ryan had an major failure on simply executing the basics.
So please everyone before shooting the wounded study the inept Romney/Ryan turnout out effort as a failure to simply execute basics. Remember another famous quote-when faced with conspiracy or incompetence go with incompetence.
Ed Timperlake was Secretary Derwinski’s Assistant Secretary (DVA) and previous Executive Director Veterans for Bush’88 and Co-Director of the Bush’88 National Security Adversary Task Force.
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