The conventional wisdom is that Romney lost the election for alot of reasons – fellow Republican’s boorish behavior towards women that bleed into public perception about Romney, an inability to identify with people outside of his class, being forced by the primary to go anti-Hispanic, his refusal to release his taxes and information on his offshore bank accounts, his robotic demeanor, and on and on – but incompetence was never on the list. He did save the Olympics after all ( yea! sure! with $400M in Federal help, but still).

I suggest that  incompetence should be at the top of the list,  incompetence driven by hubris. For months, leading up to election, the Romney campaign had touted their super high-tech voter monitoring operation to use on Election Day. It would identify which of their committed supporters have voted so they could then get the slackards to the polls. This super high-tech voter monitoring operation was called the Orca Project. Orca because the Obama operation was named Narwhal and Orcas eat Narwhals (cute, huh?).

In theory, Romney is against centralized government and centralized power but, they centralized Orca, controlling everything from Boston (in contrast, the Obama organization pushed the control of their GOTV – get out the vote or ground game – way down the food chain). When Election Day comes, the precincts start sending tons of data to Boston and Orca crashes. What a shock. The structured, tightly controlled, Romney organization is left without a head and like any very structured, tightly controlled, organization with the head removed, it becomes almost useless. Months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on over-centralization. Meanwhile, the decentralized Obama Organization preformed flawlessly.

As an aside, Romney also thought their precinct workers – mostly members of conservative religious groups – would be more numerous at 36,000 and much better motivated than the Obama precinct workers who they thought were mostly professionals (read mercenaries, I think). Why anybody would think this after 2008 or after spending five minutes thinking about Obama as an community organizer – maybe it is related to Rudy Giuliani’s comment Community Organizer? What’s that? – is beyond me. I would think that a numbers guy would realize that 36,000 is smaller than the Obama’s estimated 8,000,000. End aside.

Meanwhile, John  McCain skipped the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he was being kept in the dark about Benghazi and it was a cover-up. What a douche.

Finally – I hope, but probably not – Romney confirms that it wasn’t his fault he lost the election. He says that his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama” and he only lost because Obama gave “gifts” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters.