What, he didn't have any say in who he hired to make this work?
The POTA doesn't actually personally work on many projects. He relies on people to get them done. If Romney couldn't get something as crucial as this right, then how the heck would he have gone running the country?
The CEO of any large company is usually not personally involved in the running of day to day operations. The president is not personally involved in the administration of Social Security, Medicare, the military, or any of the other multitude of services the government provides. But at the end of the day both are held responsible for the successful functioning of their organization. How can you be expected to run a country if you can't even run a campaign?
If he can't pick a reliable deputy to manage a single IT project how could he possibly manage a government? The President has to delegate well: Mitt either couldn't or didn't place a key service under someone reliable.
If Romney has to pick n reliable deputies for various things, then for sufficiently large n, he's inevitably going to make a mistake you can pounce on, even if he's really good at picking out people. Good judgement is not an all-or-nothing dichotomy.
Oh, certainly - I would just have thought that getting out the vote is so widely recognized as a key factor in modern campaigns that he'd have put his best people on it. Would we be talking about leadership at all if, say, many of his ads were a little ham-handed?
I was unclear. I am saying that since it is not the job of a president to micromanage, it is legitimate to criticise him for fuckups he was not directly involved with.
If his job were micromanaging, then "Hey, he wasn't in the room" would excuse him of responsibility, but that is not the case. Since his job would be pretty much the greatest opposite of micromanaging I can conceive of, there can be no excuse. The failure of his campaign is his failure.
That still seems a bit unclear to me actually. Not sure how to effectively reword this.
The United States has the following federal executive departments:
* Agriculture
* Commerce
* Defense
* Education
* Energy
* Health and Human Services
* Homeland Security
* Housing and Urban Development
* Interior
* Justice
* Labor
* State Transportation
* Treasury
* Veterans Affairs
Now there is literally no way you can micromanage you way through this. Nobody, and I mean nobody can possibly single handedly do it.
However, you can delegate. Part of that is to choose honest brokers and managers who know their area well enough to ensure that their departments work well.
In this situation it is your job to delegate to the right people. If you are the President of the United States of America and you aren't able to do this with your own campaign to get elected, you must take responsibilty for your failure and accept a great deal of responsibilty for the fact you did not get elected to high office.
Harsh, but being the POTA is not a job everyone can do. I know I couldn't.
But he wasn't president. Romney was managing a campaign. And a function critical to his campaign - you gonna tell me he wasn't involved? Or at least briefed?
