Less Competent than Bloggers

By Fester:

 

The Clinton campaign deserved to lose when they can’t even figure out the rules of the game.  We first heard about this problem when it was leaked that Mark Penn did not realize the delegates were proportionally allocated. He believed the Democratic delegates were allocated on a winner take all strategy.  So his recommendation was to win California and not worry about anything else.  And now this!

From Five Thirty Eight regarding the Clinton campaign’s strategic stupidity:

Clinton National Field Director Guy Cecil’s January 19 internal memo discussing February 5th’s congressional districts and the threshold numbers from gaining or defending the gain of an extra delegate is replete with error….

Cecil specifies a 59% threshold for 22 critical run-up Clinton's or hold-down Obama's score districts – 16 strong Clinton districts and 6 strong Obama districts…

Not one of Clinton's 16 favorable districts that Cecil cites were 6-delegate districts. In 14 of them, there were four delegates, the extra-delegate threshold for a 3-1 split being 62.500%....

Out of all 22 districts where Cecil cited “59%” as the critical threshold, only one – GA-4 – was actually such a district. Obama won it, with 79.441% of the vote, and got a 5-1 split.  [emphasis in the original 538 post]

 

Those numbers can be calculated with a spreadsheet, Greenpapers.com and a bottle of Mountain Dew.  That is what I did when I analyzed the Pennsylvania primary.  That task took me, a non-paid political junkie approximately one hundred minutes, of which thirty was spent on double checking my work. I used another twenty to create a pretty embedded spreadsheet. It was not a tough calculation to perform.  Numerous other bloggers had intensive district by district breakdowns and predictions as well.  We got the math and the rules right because they were available for everyone to examine since August 2007.

If I can do those calculations for a back of the envelope, throw-away blog post, a $100,000,000 presidential campaign should also be able to do that calculation.

Wow, this is an amazing level of simple incompetence.  It may be forgivable for a blogger who is not running a damn campaign but not for the National Field Director of a major party Presidential campaign. This should, in a just and competitive market, disqualify any of Clinton’s top campaign advisers from ever working in politics again.  Well, I might hire some of them as door knockers for a competitive city council race.    That won’t happen as that would be accountability. Accountability is unpleasant.