I haven’t talked about politics much on this blog, but I think the 2012 presidential election that just wrapped up deserves a bit of comment. Let’s talk about the Mittster. What happened? A deluge of blog posts and articles have gone up this past week attempting to answer this question. The answers vary wildly depending on the source. Let’s start at the beginning to try to piece together the flow of fail.

First, you could argue that Romney’s downward spiral began at the 2012 Republican primaries. This year’s special guests included Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and many others. Much of the Obama campaign’s ammo came almost directly from the mouths of Romney’s competition. Don’t forget that running a campaign for primaries takes precious money and resources away from the presidential campaign. Granted, securing the primary does get the candidate financial/political support from the RNC and PACs, but Romney’s image had already been tarnished.

Once it became clear that Romney was going to get the nomination, the Obama team wasted no time in beginning a negative campaign against the governor to paint him as “an out-of-touch rich guy.” Team Romney spent the beginning of their ad campaign basically defining him as the “not Obama” choice. Seeing how this didn’t work out so well for John Kerry in 2004, I was surprised they didn’t put out more substance, especially when they were being blasted in the media for giving vague answers to everything. It seems like I wasn’t the only one who was critical of this approach because Team Romney slowly started to shift to a 5-point plan which defined a specific plan to deal with the economy. While all this was happening, the Republicans were dealing with internal strife because many in the party still felt Mitt was the wrong choice and wasn’t conservative enough (or oddly, not moderate enough).

This is pretty much how it went all summer. Obama’s campaign was relentless in their attacks on Mitt involving Bain Capital and his tax returns. The “swiftboating” tactics used so successfully against John Kerry in 2004 were devastating against Mitt. What was supposed to be Romney’s strongest point, being a successful CEO, was flipped upside down by Team Obama’s attacks and the message turned into one of Romney shipping jobs overseas and not caring about the average working American. Romney’s team focused on one solid message: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Some amazing flubs came out including Romney’s campaign strategist saying that Mitt’s policy stances would undergo some adjustment similar to an “etch-a-sketch”, a secretly taped video of one of Mitt’s closed-door fundraising events where he says that 47% of the American population feel they are entitled to handouts, and some horrible foreign policy incidents including a row in the UK over criticizing their handling of the Olympics and his ill-informed criticism of US actions during the Benghazi attack. Mitt seemed to be digging himself a deeper hole as the summer dragged on, but that all changed during the first presidential debate.

Romney scored a homerun on the first presidential debates. His answers were vague and at some points, just flat out lies, but he won overall based on style and his display of leadership. This brought some much-needed enthusiasm to the right and seemed to re-energize Team Romney. His performance on the subsequent debates never quite matched his first performance, but it had already done its job. Romney was rising in the polls and was soon at a dead heat with the president as election day came closer.

Then came election day. Team Obama had the Narwhal system to try and get more voters out there at the last minute while Team Romney had the newly-created Orca system. Unfortunately for Romney, Orca just couldn’t deliver on what it was supposed to do. These systems were designed to unify the large datasets used in national campaigns and, using statistical modeling, give the campaign an accurate image of the voter base and how the election will turn out. Narwhal was an epic success. Orca suffered from not enough testing, being overly complicated and difficult to use, and many user mishaps which in the end would stifle the Romney team’s election day efforts. Obama won the popular vote by around 2 million votes and scored around 300 electoral votes, crushing Mitt Romney.

There’s so much more to talk about on this issue such as the declining importance of the white male demographic in relation to those of growing minorities, the right’s failure to convince women voters to vote for them, tropical superstorm Sandy, Chris Christie, Mayor Bloomberg, etc. Unfortunately I’m rather tired and will have to do it some other time. In the end, I supported Obama this election cycle and am glad he was re-elected, but hope he changes his tune on civil liberties and intellectual property law.