Ethics

“Worthless”

I love the smell of a circular firing squad in the morning.

via TPM

Boyd Marcus, a Republican consultant and senior adviser to GOP Senate candidate George Allen, criticized former presidential candidate Mitt Romney's "worthless" organization in the state of Virginia for failing to boost Allen in the final days of the campaign, the Washington Examiner reports.

"It was a lot of activity going on," Marcus said at a panel discussion in Arlington. "Most of it was pretty worthless."

The consensus seems to be that Mitt Romney didn't really have much of an on-the-ground campaign operation and instead relied on the intuitions of Karl Rove and the persuasive power of blanketed attack ads.

With that said, I don't think it should come as a shock that George "Macaca" Allen lost to the previous chairman of the DNC in a state which most polls showed leaning in President Obama's favor.

I don't believe the Republican campaign operation four years from now will be any more reliable than the campaign we just witnessed, because at this point in time the two parties attract fundamentally different people to their sides who think and operate in completely different ways and for different reasons.

There have been reports that campaign consultants essentially fleeced the Romney campaign by presenting them with intentionally-misleading poll numbers as a form of job security. Democratic campaign operatives would never do that because they are motivated by selflessness, not selfishness.

The Democratic campaign message is "we're all in this together," while the Republican campaign message is "I got mine, screw the rest of you." And with a message like that, you shouldn't be surprised if the people who choose to work for your campaign exemplify it.