Did Team Romney Believe Its Own BS?

[JRLeft]

>snip

Dana Liebelson notes that there were several signs of profound denial emanating from the Romney camp in the waning hours. Which might explain declarations made by top Romneyites in the closing days.

About forty-eight hours before the polls would open, Rich Beeson, the political director for Camp Romney, said the following on—where else?—Fox News:

There’s an intensity factor out there on the side of the Republicans, that is a significant gap and we see it out on the ground, we see it when people are knocking on the doors, we see it when people are making the phone calls and again, it gets back to the simple fact that Governor Romney is out there talking about big things and big change, not about small things and so I think as we start seeing returns coming in from New Hampshire, from southeastern Pennsylvania, from northern Virginia, from Cuyahoga County in Ohio, I think it is going to become pretty clear that there is going to be a widespread repudiation of the Obama administration, and, Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan will be elected the next President and Vice President of the United States. And I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long to know that.

>snip

On the morning of Election Day, senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie went on—where else?—Fox News and said:

[Romney's] got momentum here on election day. And I think that's why he's going to win tonight, not just win, but win decisively. I don't think there’s going to be any doubt at the end of tonight who the next president is going to be.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/romney-campaign-believe-own-bs-spin

[villager]

1. That specific mention of Cuyahoga County again, just like Rove

What were the GOPpers led to believe, in terms of a fix they thought was iron-clad?

[JRLeft]

2. They live in their own fantasy land.

[Agnosticsherbet]

3. It was pretty clear they believed their own bull shit in the second debate when Candy fact checked

him. He should have been aware of everything the President said, but he, they, believed the bullshit.

[gkhouston]

4. Maybe you need to believe your own bullshit, just to keep going?? n/t

[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.