Did Team Romney Believe Its Own BS?

[renate]

5. the more I read the more I believe that they really did think he was going to win

Hard to believe, but this campaign was run by a bunch of people from 1912 instead of 2012.

I followed a link in the OP's article, and found this really interesting account of Project ORCA and how f-ed up their GOTV and poll-watching plans were. I've seen an excerpt from this elsewhere on DU, but not the whole thing.

At 6:30AM on Tuesday, I went to the polls. I was immediately turned away because I didn't have my poll watcher certificate. Many, many people had this problem. The impression I got was this was taken care of because they had "registered me". Others were as well. But apparently, I was supposed to go on my own to a Victory Center to pick it up, but that was never communicated properly. Outside of the technical problems, this was the single biggest failure of the operation. They simply didn't inform people that this was a requirement. In fact, check out my "checklist" from my ORCA packet:

(there's a picture here, obviously)

Notice anything missing? My guess is the second "Chair (if allowed)" was supposed to be "poll watcher certificate" but they put chair twice. This was an instruction packet that went out to 30,000+ people. Did no one proof-read it?
So, I headed back home to see if I could get my certificate. I called their official help line. It went unanswered. I tried their legal line. Same thing. I emailed them. No response. I continued to do this for six straight hours and never got a response. I even tried to call three local victory centers. All went straight to voicemail.

While I was home, I took to Twitter and the web to try to find some answers. From what I saw, these problems were widespread. People had been kicked from poll watching for having no certificate. Others never received their pdf packets. Some were sent the wrong packets from a different area. Some received their packet, but their usernames and passwords didn't work.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php

I think Rove had, at least at one point, planned to steal Ohio (whether he, or more likely someone else, chickened out, was the subject of some interesting threads I read this morning). I wonder whether Ohio would have been closer or even plausibly stealable, and whether any of the other swing states could have gone the other way, if their GOTV plans had worked and if there had been professionals running the Romney campaign instead of cockeyed optimists and lazy amateurs.