Project ORCA: Mitt Romney Campaign Plans

Massive, State-Of-The-Art Poll Monitoring Effort

Posted: 11/01/2012 11:07 am EDT Updated: 11/02/2012 10:36 am EDT

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney's presidential campaign has been quietly assembling a massive, technologically sophisticated poll monitoring program that staffers believe will be their secret weapon in defeating President Barack Obama.
Project ORCA will rely on 34,000 volunteers in swing states on Election Day, in an effort to keep track of who is voting at key polling places. Romney staffers will use the data to help them target their get-out-the-vote efforts before the polls close, in hopes of gaining an edge over Obama's grassroots operation.
"There's nothing that the Obama data team, there's nothing that the Obama campaign, there's nothing that President Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here," Romney Deputy Political Director Dan Centinello said Wednesday night in a training call for Project ORCA volunteers, which The Huffington Post called into.
On Election Day, the Romney campaign will send one or more volunteers to important swing-state polling places, noting every single person who comes in to vote.
That, in itself, is nothing new; both Democratic and Republican campaigns always monitor turnout to aid their GOTV efforts and generally keep track of progress.
In 2008, the Obama campaign used a system called "Project Houdini," where each targeted voter was assigned a four-digit code. Throughout the day, volunteers then dialed that code into a national hotline to report on who voted.
What's different about the Romney campaign's approach is that it will be utilizing smartphone technology to receive more data in real time, allowing it to quickly redirect resources to areas where there may be low turnout and get voters there out to the polls.
Volunteers will have the Project ORCA web-based app on their smartphone. Once they log in, they will see the names and ages of every eligible voter in that precinct. When someone votes, the volunteer will simply be able to slide a bar and note it. Individuals without smartphones will be able to print a list of voters -- provided by the Romney campaign -- and check off individuals who come to the polling place, and then call that information into headquarters periodically.
If volunteers run into any problems -- such as an incorrect voting list, broken voting machines, fraud or illegal activity -- they can press a yellow button on their phone to instantly report them to the Romney campaign legal team, and staffers will be assigned to help volunteers around the country. Volunteers will also be able to send instant messages -- similar to a Twitter feed or discussion board -- with anecdotes about what they are seeing.
Training materials explaining the technology were provided to The Huffington Post by multiple sources.
At campaign headquarters in Boston, other volunteers will be taking all the information sent in by those working with Project ORCA and combining it with consumer data the campaign has purchased about individuals. They will use the data to organize last-minute campaign efforts, including social media outreach, phone-banking and traditional door-to-door visits.
In addition, Centinello will be in an "inner war room" with the campaign manager, the national political director and Romney himself.
"The governor loves seeing data, he loves seeing numbers and he's a very strategic person; he's a very smart man," Centinello said on Wednesday's Project ORCA call. "So he actually loves being inside these war rooms, seeing the data come in and seeing exactly what's going on out there, so we can all put our heads together and say, 'Okay, we need to move resources here. We need to shift resources from here.'"
On Wednesday afternoon, the campaign sent volunteers a video from Romney, thanking them for their help.
"With state-of-the-art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on Election Day," said Romney.
"Project ORCA will give us an enormous advantage on Election Day," added Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul in a statement to The Huffington Post. "By knowing the current results of a state, we can continue to adjust and micro target our get-out-the-vote efforts to ensure a Romney victory."
Scott Goodstein, the external online director for the Obama campaign in 2008 and the founder of Revolution Messaging, said that while Project ORCA may use different technology, the overall strategy behind it is nothing new.
"We've already done this through text messaging and interactive voice since the early days of the Iowa caucus in January 2008," said Goodstein, noting that before that, campaigns would give volunteers quarters to call in results at pay phones.
He also questioned whether the strategy would really make as much of a difference as the Romney campaign was suggesting it would, arguing that if a candidate hasn't reached voters by Election Day, it's probably too late.
"In a national campaign, what additional things are the headquarters really going to do to move resources?" he said. "Will an additional auto-call last minute really make a difference in a market like Northeast Ohio, which has been saturated for three months full of auto-calls?"
While some liberal blogs have worried that Project ORCA could be a voter suppression program, the training packet instructs volunteers not to "talk to or confront voters in any circumstances." Centinello also repeatedly told volunteers listening on the training call to follow poll workers' instructions on where to stand and what the rules are in that location.
But Daniel Tokaji, an expert on election law and voting rights at Mortiz College of Law in Ohio, flagged an issue in the "frequently asked questions" section of the training packet that could potentially confuse volunteers.
The answer to Question 13 -- "Am I allowed to speak on my cell phone inside the polling place?" -- states, "Yes you may be allowed to use the smart phone inside the polling place. Please follow your poll manager's instructions." That answer appears to have been swapped with the answer to Question 11 -- "Am I allowed to use the smart phone app inside the polling place?" -- which currently reads, "No, you are only allowed to speak on your phone outside the voting area."
In many polling places, people are not allowed to speak on the phone, and on the call with volunteers, Centinello instructed them not to. They are, however, allowed to use the smartphone app, and the mix-up in the training packet may cause confusion.
In general, Tokaji said, the type of monitoring the Romney campaign is doing with Project ORCA -- and that the Obama campaign will also no doubt be doing -- should be encouraged.
"It's a way of boosting turnout, if the parties are doing this and making sure all their people turn out," he said.
The Obama campaign declined to comment on Project ORCA or whether it has a similar program in place, but a recent memo from the campaign said that in battleground states, it is "recruiting thousands of attorney volunteers to help recruit, train, educate, and observe at polling locations across the country."
Vincent Harris, the founder and CEO of the conservative digital advertising and marketing firm Harris Media, said he wouldn't doubt that the Obama campaign has something similar set up, since it has consistently been on the cutting edge of digital politics.
But he said that Project ORCA will nevertheless give the Romney team a "huge advantage."
"They have so much data and it all is coming to a head on Election Day -- six years of data-capture, six years of data-gathering, all culiminating on Election Day," said Harris. "And this new tool is the key to using that data."

“a prairie fire of debt.”: Matt Taibbi's Killer Takedown of Mitt Romney

 According to Rolling Stone's Taibbi, either we wise up to Romney’s game, or we succumb to “a prairie fire of debt.”

September 5, 2012  |  

 

It’s too bad he’s such a successful journalist, because it looks like Matt Taibbi would have made an incredible banker. He’s latest bet--that people would be willing to read a 8,000-word explanation of the business model of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s private equity firm--has paid of epically. As the September cover story of Rolling Stone, the article has already racked up 64,000 likes on facebook and an incensed army of readers who now know the secret to Romney’s “shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy.” 

Sure, Taibbi’s article saddled them with a dictionary-worth of industry acronyms that they’ve now got bouncing around in their brains, but who knows when someone’s going to put a gun to your head and demand to know the difference between a CDO and and an LBO? 

Well, actually, Taibbi says that time is now. According to the article, either we wise up to Romney’s game, or, as Romney himself warned, succumb to “a prairie fire of debt.”

Taibbi’s thesis is simple: Mitt Romney is a manipulative liar who is leveraging our fear of debt to win the election. That much, so far, is nothing new. But wait--here’s the catch. Romney’s private equity firm and, indeed, the entire new piracy economy that he “built” (to borrow the theme of Romney’s platform), is based on creating more and more debt for average Americans. 

As Taibbi writes, “Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.”

To vote for Romney, then, is to vote for debt and the subsequent fire-induced death itself.

To damning to be true, you think? Well, it might be worth delving into how private equity actually works, which constitutes the bulk of Taibbi’s article.

First off, he’s quick to distinguish private equity from the last few generations of rich white folks who got fabulously wealthy off other people’s hard labor and then ran for president. These people, Taibbi says, at least left something in their wake.

“In the old days,” he writes, “making money required sharing the wealth: with assembly-line workers, with middle management, with schools and communities, with investors. Even the Gilded Age robber barons, despite their unapologetic efforts to keep workers from getting any rights at all, built America in spite of themselves, erecting railroads and oil wells and telegraph wires. And from the time the monopolists were reined in with antitrust laws through the days when men like Mitt Romney's dad exited center stage in our economy, the American social contract was pretty consistent: The rich got to stay rich, often filthy rich, but they paid taxes and a living wage and everyone else rose at least a little bit along with them.”

That’s not, however, the Romney business model. Instead, his involves borrowing money to buy a company, then transferring that debt to the newly acquired company, and then asking for some more money from the company before flying off to the Cayman Islands.

As Taibbi writes, “Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to

90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. ... But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.”

But what’s in it for Romney, one might ask? Well, as the new company is drowning in debt payments, Bain is luckily lurking around, instructing them how to cut costs--which usually involves restructuring, a fancy-pants word for firing a bunch of people. And in exchange for that golden advice, Bain charges the company a whole bunch of management and consulting fees.

According to Taibbi, this business model is nothing new. “Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. ‘It's the bust-out,’ one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. ‘That's all it is.’”

Of course, there’s a whole lot more to the story, like the fact that the geeky private equity people were sort of like a cult (some called them “Bainies”) and that their returns for investors really weren’t all that great--especially not good enough to justify the devastation left in Bain’s wake. Taibbi interviews some devastated toy manufacturers who fell victim to the P.E. machine, digs back into Romney’s history to find some dirty money floating around, and explains how this whole private equity industry is subsidized by the federal government. For those juicy details you’ll have to read the whole article.

But just in case you were worried that, really, Romney is a threat only to the also pro-business Obama machine, think again. 

Taibbi writes, “Obama ran on "change" in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart.... It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning.”