On election day, Team Romney had this going for them:
The one day that matters most to Mitt Romney, and the one feature on his Web site that matters most on this day of days – “Find Where You Vote” – doesn’t even work (more on that at the bottom of this story).
Earlier today, Mitt Romney’s campaign emailed a friend of mine this morning and told him to vote – tomorrow.
OOPS. Apparently the Romney web designers were paying attention to other stuff:
That’s the Romney campaign’s transition website. You know, after they won the election they couldn’t waste their time to try to win.
Tom Levenson
Awesome. And of a piece with the bizarre Romney decision to distract local field work in Pennsylvania and Ohio on election day by throwing in a couple of unanticipated campaign stops.
And remember: Romney was going to be a great president because of his super-heroic mad manager skillz.
Comrade Mary
To be fair, it doesn’t hurt to have a boilerplate site like this prepped in advance, It really didn’t take that long. The code on the page doesn’t look that complex, the design is — serviceable — and there isn’t much content.
To be fair and professional, YOU DON’T FUCKING WELL PUT UP A DRAFT SITE ON AN OPEN SERVER. You keep the damn design in house, and if you must test on a live site, you password protect it.
Fuck, did they even put a robots.txt file in that folder?
NotMax
Y’know, never mentioned it, but always wondered about the audience whenever Romney or Ryan would blurt out their crapola about ‘becoming Greece.’
How many listening thought “Grease? I kinda liked that movie.”
arguingwithsignposts
@Comrade Mary:
You don’t see the big robot smiling on the page?
(and yes, I know what a robot.txt file is)
Violet
It’s not a bad idea to have a transition site ready to go, but in combination with the “where to vote” FAIL and the fact that the transition site was on an open server…it just confirms the bumbling, inept Romney we’ve all come to know and loathe.
Roger Moore
@Tom Levenson:
And his number one mad manager skill was hiring yes men who would tell him whatever he wanted to hear. CEO President FTW.
Villago Delenda Est
The fail. You’re soaking in it.
arguingwithsignposts
I didn’t even know geocities still existed!
NotMax
So, as the public inauguration is announced as the day following the private inauguration, per the site (in a quiet room, no doubt), all that stuff about Day One was a pile of you-know-what as well?
maya
The Magic has left Mitt’s underoos.
The Moar You Know
Wow, three front pagers posting all in the same two-minute time span.
Don’t you guys have a schedule or something?
redshirt
And so another 4 years go by and my Greg Stillson fears can sleep easy, for a while.
That webpage would have been confirmation of the nightmare.
Tom Levenson
@The Moar You Know:
No.
SATSQ
Pooh
Too. Much. Schadenfreude.
Cmm
Redshirt
Amen, Greg Stillson has been on my mind a lot. Romney is the personification of that character, right down to the early glimpse of the real man through his treatment of a dog.
Mike in NC
Christ, what a pathetic narcissist Rmoney was. Please self-deport, you clueless imbecile.
Tonal Crow
That is ten tons of awesome in a 5-pound bag. Yep, Mitt’s a first-rate manager all right, and he’d do a bang-up job as President. Ha. Ha. Ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Awooooooooooooooooooo!
Mnemosyne
I don’t doubt for a second that in 2008 Obama’s people already had a shortlist of names for each cabinet position and that they had a transition website ready to go live at least a couple of weeks before the election.
But they weren’t stupid enough to put it on an open server.
Paul Day-Lucore
It’s especially awesome that they think the inauguration would be on January 21. I assume this is ’cause Jan 20 is a Sunday, and some doofus thinks they can just move the inauguration to Monday. The 20th amendment says the term of the President ends at noon on Jan 20 with no exceptions. Another example of how this is a “Christian Nation,” I guess.
Tonal Crow
@Villago Delenda Est:
Shhh! We have secretly replaced the Republican Party’s brain-trust with sand and ground glass. Let’s see whether they notice!
suzanne
The design is Photoshop vomit. Gradients and drop-shadows and bevels, oh my! I bet there’s a lens flare somewhere. And I’m SO SICK of Trajan and Garamond being the “America” fonts.
I have to admit that, while it’s pretty far down on the list of Reasons I Love Barack Obama, good graphic design is one of them.
arguingwithsignposts
@Mnemosyne: Somewhere on the Internet, there was a profile of the Obama tech team that was posted today. Even as cutting edge as the 2008 tech effort was, the 2012 one was even more so. IIRC, the guy who did fake rahm was part of the team (don’t quote me on that). Here’s hoping that braintrust gets used in future elections, particularly 2014.
arguingwithsignposts
@suzanne: the design is, like most GOP efforts, a distant copy of Obama ’08.
redshirt
@Cmm: No doubt.
I’ve been freaking myself out a bit – I keep expecting Romney’s head to turn towards me and then zoom in a bit on his eyes, his black, black, raven black eyes…..
AAIIEE!!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@suzanne:
Speaking of which, something struck me while watching the videos of Karl Rove’s bagman caught without his bag meltdown on Fox over the Ohio call. Which is that Fox New’s visuals really, really suck. Everything about them, the studio, the chyrons, all of it, just screamed bad graphic design circa 2002. I remember in their early days Fox had a more slick and packaged look than the other TV networks who seemed stodgy and old-fashioned by comparison, and I imagine this was part of what helped them build credibility with naive viewers. But boy the tables sure have been turned on them and they look like shit now.
suzanne
@arguingwithsignposts: The design is, like most GOP efforts, something a competent yet inexperienced high school student would come up with.
suzanne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: The FOX logo has always looked trashy to me. The type is horsey and awkward, and all the bevels and glows and drop shadows they put on it doesn’t help. It’s like the thinking that leads someone wearing pants that sag so far your ass that the entire world can see what kind of boxers you’re wearing to decide to class up the look with a giant gold chain.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@suzanne:
I’m guessing that Fox’s graphics are focus-group tested using old people with bad eyesight and fond memories of 1950s advertising.
Comrade Mary
FONT NERRRRRRRRRRDS!
My people.
batgirl
I used Obama’s gottavote website to find the polling place locations of patrons that called my library on Tuesday. Worked like a charm for all but one (and much cleaner than the local board of elections website).
suzanne
@Comrade Mary:
I prefer to be called “font savant”. ;)
pseudonymous in nc
@arguingwithsignposts:
A lot of them are going elsewhere — one is headed to Etsy as soon as the campaign winds down fully — but I’d want a lot of them to be kept on and try to do with US government tech what a relatively small team has been doing (with very little partisan influence) in London. Startup mentality, use open tools and standards, iterate quickly. The in-house techs at the White House have done some of that, but the departmental stuff is a lot more hidebound.
It was interesting (but not surprising) that they had their own in-house Nate Silvers, doing poll-based simulation and using it to channel resources. I wonder whether that was vaguely know, hence the wingnut assault on Silver in the last week.
redshirt
@pseudonymous in nc: LOL. Campaigns “have” Nate Silvers now. I remember when he was just a hot pepper…
SixStringFanatic
@Paul Day-Lucore: Thanks a ton for putting me in the position of defending the Team Romney doofuses, but whenever the inaugural date falls on a Sunday, the long-standing tradition is to have a private swearing-in at noon on Jan. 20th and then do all of the public events, including a public re-creation of the swearing-in, on Monday the 21st.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration
WereBear
I adore this post.
It sums up the whole Myth of Mitt the Magic Manager so beautifully!
donnah
Ugh, all I know is that when I see that and think there would have been even the slightest chance of it being real, I get sick at my stomach.
SBJules
The L.A. Times had an article about Nate Silver this morning & how he got everything right. One Republican polster said he disregarded some of his polling because he thought they must have included too many Democrats.
Numbers don’t lie!
WaterGirl
The more I see of Romney and how certain they were of a win – I’m looking at you, fireworks in Boston as soon as Romney could declare victory on Tuesday night, among other things – I am even more certain that Romney thought Ohio was bought and paid for, and maybe Florida as well.
But turnout was higher than they expected, so it didn’t work out as planned.
I would really love to have you all tell me I’m completely wrong, because I find the idea of Romney being so certain he would win to be pretty terrifying.
LanceThruster
@WaterGirl:
Romentum is a hellava drug. Consult your doctor if you experience prolonged symptoms of delusion not accounted for by yes men.