The great Italian composer Giacchino Rossini had a practice following the premier of one of his operas. He would send a drawing of a bottle to his friends, a small bottle if the opera went reasonably well, a large one if it went horribly. “Fiasco” means bottle in Italian.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal respond to the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses:
There’s no shortage of mordant fun to be had at the expense of the Democratic National Committee and Iowa Democratic Party after the fiasco of the inaugural 2020 presidential contest, which has yet to yield definitive results apparently as a result of coding errors in a tabulation app created by party insiders. The college of cardinals at least lets the world know with white or black smoke how the vote for pope is going.
Here the party that waxes sanctimonious about election security couldn’t secure its own election from itself. Here the party that has spent three years questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election will see the legitimacy of its own custom-designed process questioned. Here the party that promises technocratic management of American health care, energy and finance proved less able to tally votes even than the ancient Athenians.
What is the worst aspect of the face-plant of the Iowa caucuses:
- It may help Bernie Sanders.
- It may hurt Joe Biden.
- It provides a graphic demonstration of the fecklessness of present Democratic Party leadership.
- The reactions by prominent Democrats to the situation.
- All of the above.
- None of the above. It went swimmingly.
- Other
- Pass the popcorn.
I think E but especially D.
E.
Rollouts of new programs often have problems. I am always pleasantly surprised when they go well. The more prep and practice you have before going live seems to matter quite a bit, though we do have one EPIC issue that continues to be a bother 5 years after we started using it. It sounds like they had minimal training. It was poorly planned. Maybe poorly written. Who knows? If they had just shrugged and said it was a botched rollout, which happens, they still get to be the butts of a lot of humor, but it probably goes better. The way they handled it makes them all look bad.
Not really seeing how it helped Sanders much. By report, a lot of the changes they made were done at Sanders request.
Steve
Exactly.
The app was so super secret they didn’t let Homeland Security vet it for security. Maybe they thought Homeland might hack it. Turns out they did.
An alternate explanation is that the results were so bad for the preferred choice(s) that they had to go into bunker mode to figure out how to fudge the data and put the blame on the app. We may never know.
Apparently the Bernie people, not trusting the DNC, collected results independently, which don’t jibe with ‘official’ results. Not surprisingly they are in Tasmanian Devil mode, especially at Tom Perez.
G.
Sometimes, in order to recognize how bad your problem is, you have to hit rock bottom. Worst outcome from the Republican pov because they may start to get their s**t together.