Romney not well served by strategist

Martin Knight:

Sometime before Election Day, before the debates, people already knew Stuart Stevens and his team were in over their heads. From the utter fiasco of Romney’s convention speech, which he stripped down to a thin gruel of bland forgettable pablum (and of course, stripped of any mention of America’s servicemen and women abroad), throwing aside Bush’s micro-targetting programmed wholesale, allowing his Hollywood aspirations to make him give the prime speaking slot at the RNC to Clint Eastwood (without any vetting) instead of people who would humanize his candidate, I just thought at the time, that Stu Stevens was simply disorganized.

Then, we found out about ORCA, and the fact that Stevens and his team (Moffat, et al.) still thought the system performed well because … “metrics”. Then came the revelation that Stevens had no concept of the idea that what voters tell pollsters is often quite different from what would actually influence them in favor of candidate A or B.

Then we discovered the wide disparity in both quality, quantity and reach of advertising (in Obama’s favor), despite the fact that this was supposed to be where Stevens was going to dominate and make up for months of unanswered attacks –down the home stretch the Obama Campaign and its allies outperformed Romney and every single Conservative SuperPAC on every possible measure; “[Obama] spent less on advertising than Romney and his allies but got far more — in the number of ads broadcast, in visibility in key markets and in targeting critical demographic groups, such as the working class and younger voters in swing states … Romney not only paid more for his ads but also missed crucial opportunities to advertise, for instance during the political conventions and on Spanish-language television …”

When it came to online advertising, the graph to your right tells you the entire story.

Considering the horrendous amount of what was very rightly called campaign malpractice in that WaPo piece, there actually is a viable argument that Mitt Romney could take Stuart Stevens and Co. to court for fraud.

But as they say; never attribute to malice what can just as easily be attributed to abject stupidity.

Top Romney Strategist Stuart Stevens Says Media Not ‘In The Tank’ For President Obama

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There is more.

Did Stevens really miss that the media was seriously in the tank for Obama?  Did he not notice their mad dogging of Romney for making a correct observation about the Cairo embassy's groveling response to being attacked?  Did he not notice the cover up on the Libyan fiasco?

One of the biggest mistakes of the campaign was going with a theme of "Obama is a nice guy in over his head."  The theme from the Obama campaign was that Romney was a tax cheat who hated dogs and would fire someone so that their wife would die of cancer.  Given those two themes guess which one prevailed.  Add the influence of the media and you can predict the margin of victory almost.