Failure was mismatching skills
1. Hiring a gay Buddhist to run the campaign, when you are running (purportedly) for the Republican nomination which still has a huge Christian conservative base that would never vote for a campaign so led. Allowing several more gays to work out of the Arlington offices and giving the overall impression of a "cliquish" atmosphere.
2. Promoting Joe Seehusen after he messed up the Ames Straw poll and after his "consulting firm" donated $10,000 to the RP campaign. Dissing the "Vote Scam" people totally and doing nothing to insure the Ames results were correct.
3. Having no back up for the computerized supporter lists and no hard copy of the supporter lists so that a "disgruntled employee" could walk out with that crucial info the morning of the crucial IA caucus and totally ruin our chances at a respectable 3rd place finish in Iowa. Firing nobody after this happened.
4. Hiring a former housewife who had never even voted before to take over the State of MI headquarters after Paul Garfield was dumped (for no stated reason) and then hiring a 24-year old college student from Skull & Bones U. who worked on the Bush campaign in 2004 to be her "right hand" gal.
5. Not running a single national TV ad, EVER, thus confirming the MSM-pumped impressions that we were not running a serious campaign.
6. Multiple financial irregularities (that have cited many times here before) that at a bare minimum have a very real "appearance of evil."
7. Dissing national media figures repeatedly, including canceling pre-arranged interviews a few minutes beforehand.
8. Totally shutting out multiple offers from the grassroots of free or reduced-cost assistance for services in a number of professional areas with which the campaign obviously needed help (ex: ad production, delegate training, etc., etc., etc.)
9. Failing to hire a single person with long and proven credentials in the patriot movement either at the national, regional or state levels.
10. Shutting out a billionaire's offer of $100,000,000 because he asked that certain people at national HQ be replaced with competent and truly devoted patriots.
Heck...I could go on all night...but it's bed time...
Steve,
Um, wow.
You know I don't doubt you're in this for Dr. Paul, nor do I think you question my motives. You also know that I've not been afraid to criticize when I thought it would be constructive (and yes, I certainly am human there too).
But, wow. Not to go all Madison on your Patrick Henry ass, but...
On the first question, I don't see it. I'm ignorant of many things, but to the best of my knowledge, Kent hired the first few people then turned all hiring over to others. The more common complaint I heard (third hand, anecdotal) was the hiring of "born agains" or "Evangelicals" or something (sometimes with speculation to compete with Huckabee or something). I, personally, didn't see (and don't believe) any hiring conspiracy with any motivation at all (unless there is some grand gay Buddhist, Jewish, Evangelical, Cato/Koch, neocon conspiracy of which I'm unaware, but I tend to stay out of Hot Topics
). I know lots of people hired people they already knew, which is understandable, and can be good or bad.
As critical as I've been of the official campaign staffers where I thought it would be better for the movement, I do think most of them would have been good at something else. Heck, McHugh is working for me now on the
Vern McKinley for Congress campaign! Yup. Wouldn't trust him with responsibilities for getting delegates for a Republican presidential primary campaign, but he's got lots of other skills that could have greatly helped Dr. Paul get to the White House.
My point here is that the campaign management took great potential--not only all of the things we know of in the grassroots but among the official campaign staff itself--and squandered it. That is the tragedy. Official campaign staffers who could have been kick ass in one capacity (#2, possibly Seehusen? I have no idea) were then tasked to do something for which they were completely unqualified by experience, temperment, education, knowledge or whatever with no guidance or assistance. Then they floundered. It's a pity, but not a conspiracy. There's a leadership vacuum at the top that created a black hole sucking up all of the skills and potential of the rest of the staff, grassroots ...
3. huge, unquestionable failure--unpardonable that systemic changes still haven't been made for redundancies: look at all of the complaints of the Precinct Leader system losing updated information.
4. Bad premise. Lots of people with no previous experience did great things. I thought Trevor was amazing! Go back to my point about mismatching potentials.
On the rest, I might have ideas but am too ignorant to really speculate publicly.
So, at the risk of returning to the topic of the thread...
Jonathan, do you think there was a (major!) problem of mismatching people to responsibilities at HQ?
