My favorite doomsday mechanism.

Translating from Robert Burns. IF all there hopes are reduced to ops and schemes they ARE a dead party. Military strategies based on big machine detailed plans of the most unscrupulous and powered sort have ended up only in the biggest of disasters. Timewise very quickly. With spectacular misery no doubt for all, but decisive defeat and in the case of Germany, steaming ahead to a second more decisive defeat. Economical and politics are even less immune than the professional military from the exigencies of the real world and the opportunistic chaos they purposefully create.

Void of the skills of self-reflection and service of the common good they seem doomed to die. How ugly for the rest of us depends on how much we tolerate their scheming in the lead-up to the next assault on democracy.

...and that's the bottom line here. The system appears to have been so poorly designed and tested that it wasn't ready for prime time. Why this happened may be a chapter some Rmoney operative will write in a tell-all about what is sure to be remembered as one of the most inept campaigns in American political history. The real failure of ORCA is the lack of an infrastructure...a ground game that it was designed for (sorry, I'm not buying any vote flipping conspiracy until solid evidence is proven) and Willard didn't have that ground game...period. We saw that OFA had 2 and 3 times the number of field offices in key states that busted their humps to contact voters, get them registered and to the polls. Trying to dig deeper into the flop of ORCA or team Rmoney diminishes the tremendous accomplishment that those working for President Obama and overall people power were able to achieve.

Of course the rushpublicans will be back...we're seeing they haven't learned much from the thumping they got. And...they're likely to make the same mistakes again...believe their own imaginary "media", overestimate or skew polls that they don't like and think they can throw money around and win elections that way. Thus...Democrats can't sit back, either...the next campaign has already begun...

Their mission and their tactics never change.

I remember talk after 2004 and 2008 about how the r's were doing detailed targeting of voters and were able to identify and motivate voters in specific households based on issues more or less single issues.

It's clear to me that in WI some similar databases drove both telephone calls and updated canvassers during the Walker Recall. Based on a year of incessent phone calls and ringing doorbells it became clear that the Dems were in the same game.

But the Dems had a much better ground organization

I believe it [the Romney project] was named Orca in order to present it as a predator on the Obama's tech team's Narwhal project. What makes Narwhal different in this election cycle was the bringing in the tech staff to be inhouse, rather than outside consultant driven. We see the end result; the Obama campaign could depend on their information from their digital and IT side, and Orca crashed and burned.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/