Except it was all an illusion, and for the Romney campaign, a delusion. Being good at business also means getting the job done. It means efficiency and organization. And Romney turned out to be very bad at business.
This is becoming clearer in the campaign postmortems. Usually a strategist or candidate will divulge the moment they knew they were probably going to lose. But apparently, with the same data available to them as to everyone else, they never believed it. They were in denial on election night. They were so very sure of themselves. Confidence is great. Not being able to read the numbers is incompetence.
But that's just one bit of evidence. The Romney campaign spent millions and perhaps billions on media, enriching its senior staff but getting little bang for their bucks. They made inefficient media buys throughout the campaign.
Their ground operation also failed. It failed partly for the same reason their media did: they outsourced. Their vaunted system to target and deliver voters called ORCA was an ineffective mess.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign ran what some are calling the best political operation in history. They used their strategic advantages, made some big bold moves. But basically they worked the details. They were very organized and disciplined about identifying and bringing in new voters, and identifying and delivering their voters.
So it turns out that President Obama is the CEO of this campaign. The Obama campaign was good at business. The Romney campaign was terrible at their business.
The truth is that Mitt Romney has never been good at business. He's been good at making money, which is an entirely different thing.
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