According to the article they were prepared to set the fireworks off as late as 12:30 a.m.  Given that Romney lost MA by double digits that probably wouldn’t have gone over too well with the locals. ;-)

There’s layer upon layer of juicy schaden here that doesn’t seem to want to let up giving me freude.

The arch-consultant, epitomizing the worst of the breed, parachuted in with a slick sales pitch promising short-term salvation to a desperate conglomerate in return for what passes for their souls (and ultimately the contents of their bank accounts), falling prey to consultants parachuted in ...

And even after all that they hired Sylvester McMonkey McBean.

Yeah, Vixen, during the election, to the very dregs, Rubin used her column to overhype Mitt and how masterful his campaign was at every opportunity. Now she writes:

But Stevens fails in precisely the way in which the campaign failed: a refusal to acknowledge real and material incompetence by himself and others on the campaign. The piece stubbornly refuses to express regrets or apologies for a campaign that, as evidence has come forth, makes “The Perils of Pauline” look like the Rockettes.

The closest Stevens comes to admitting any responsibility for a campaign with grossly defective polling, weirdly ineffective ad buying and a get-out-the-vote operation that will forever give Orca whales a bad name is this: “In my world, the definition of the better campaign is the one that wins.”

Well, that tautology pretty much sums up the attitude during the campaign, in which “in his world” the press was at fault, Obama was at fault, conservatives were at fault, the other pollsters were at fault and foreign policy hawks were at fault but never the Boston team.

As we and many, many others documented in great detail and at some length, the Romney campaign was a disastrous freakshow from beginning to end, and this was abundantly clear to anyone who didn’t don partisan blinkers.

And whatever happened to that story that the Romney family, dissatisfied with the way Mitt was being allowed to be portrayed, took over campaign direction late on? That seems to have been airbrushed out of history (assuming it was true).

I’ve hesitated to write much about the aftermath and pick over the bones of Mitt’s failure because what’s the point in solving the Republicans’ conundrum for them? By the looks of it, they’re intent on not learning any lessons anyway, so I may rethink all that and just go for the pointing and laughing and see if I can’t help stoke the fires of division a little (and apply some reverse psychology).

As you said:

They invested in useless stuff like generating fake Twitter followers and Facebook likes trying to get a bandwagon effect—and invested nothing in trying to have a bandwagon for folks to properly get on.

I believe they thought they had a ready-made bandwagon in the rightwing blogs—remember those fawning mutual backscratching puff pieces at Big Journalism. As for the MSM, it’s hilarious if they’re being blamed for Mitt’s failure—in all my time of observing politics, I can’t remember a more craven lack of inquiry from the broadcast and print media than we saw this year. For example, how the hell did we get to November without Mitt’s refusal to release even ONE FULL YEAR’S TAX RETURNS being a significant and persistent storyline? The whole Mittmentum myth was self-serving concoction to keep up the appearances of a horserace, and it was eggs all round when the poll to end all polls revealed the truth.

I think a major problem was Mitt’s historic lack of any real ideology or concrete plans for governing beyond what he imagined it would take to get elected. For instance, we still don’t know what his job creation strategy would have been beyond “Hey, there’s one of us in the White House again, so throw the rubes some crumbs to keep them happy.”

Not being an echt rightwinger himself, he tried to fill the vacuum by coopting the noisy, obnoxious online echo chamber that already existed, I suppose assuming it embodied a real and suitably numerous social force rather than the inane burblings of an incestuous bunch of overrated extremist deadenders, and pandered to it way beyond the time when everyone thought the Etch A Sketch would be shaken up.

Given all that, I don’t think even a competent campaign staff could have saved him. And by all accounts, he hadn’t assembled a competent campaign staff, just a gaggle of yesmen and grifters with too little money to throw around early on after he won the nomination when it really mattered, then far too much directed ineffectually and wastefully when it was too late to rescue the situation.

The main thing is, the problem with Romney’s campaign was the problem with McCain’s campaign (which I always called “McCampaign” when covering it, as a beast with its own dimensions in attributes, which Romcamp distinctly did not even own, itself), to wit: there is no small amount of grifterism extant in conservatism as a whole these days, and a political campaign, owing to the money issue, attracts grifters like nothing we’ve seen previously.  It’s like throwing out stale cereal where birds are known to congregate—swarms appear.

Bird mess, however, is cleaner than having industry lobbyists (where, after all, is the money coming from?) writing campaign policy. Did Romney’s “clean coal=jobs” plea make sense either inside or outside of the Apppalachians? Or can a misdirection like the Jeep fib really survive being aired where thinking people can see, and not just ideologues? 

I actually wonder if the upshot of CU (nt) will be that we end up with cleaner financed elections because people with money recognize that it’s just a waste, and a political election would be just as fit for a mafia cash-laundering op as a business investment.

@YAFB - the incompetence of RMoney’s staff/hangers on was monumental.  The Schieber piece just highlights it.  The scary part is that Mittbot COULD have won.  I didn’t think he would and went off to Italy (after voting early) secure in the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t but, as I said, damn, we dodged one hell of a bullet.

And, yeah, those Romney tax returns never did show up, did they?  But we people don’t have to give a shit about that now so have a nice life Egg!  And buh-bye!

They invested in useless stuff like generating fake Twitter followers and Facebook likes trying to get a bandwagon effect—and invested nothing in trying to have a bandwagon for folks to properly get on.

I think this was worse than useless because so many of those “fans” were patently false.  There’s too much transparency in the social media to pull off such sock-puppeting on a grand scale, so Romney’s social media ineptitude became just another source of ridicule.