Wonderful anatomy of a debacle. This is turning into a great news day.
Iowa caucus 2020: Inside the Iowa Democratic Party’s ‘boiler room,’ where ‘hell’ preceded the results catastrophe
FTA:
The volunteers tasked with helping the local leaders said they had never seen the app, nor had they been trained to use it.
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The boiler room sequestered those taking phone calls. Another room had been set up nearby for important political figures. And a strategy room acted as a command center.
Few people had access to more than one room.
So as calls piled up, it was unclear to those inside the boiler room whether party leaders located elsewhere were aware of the problems.
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Each had a handful of tally marks beneath the corresponding heading.
But volunteers said there were between 75 and 100 tally marks noted under the headline, “the app isn’t working.”
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As the calls came in, volunteers had begun taking down results on paper forms and passing them into the strategy room, which had morphed into a makeshift data entry center. One person who was in the room said the “system” they created involved taking the data and compiling it through Google Docs.
People sat in clusters with their laptops — papers piling up around them. Boxes were labeled “new results” for those that needed to be added, and another “still f-—ed” for those that had problems with the math, the person said.
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“It just became very clear that members of the public in general had started calling,” he said.
“One call would be someone screaming at me that CNN was screaming about the results,” said a different volunteer. “And then the next call would be somebody actually calling in the results. Or journalists were phone banking the phone bank. So we couldn’t talk to precinct captains because CNN was having their entire staff f-—ing phone bank us.”
Some were friendly Iowans seeking to give the call center volunteers a boost.
Wonderful. Again.
https://spectator.us/mayor-pete-moderate-bernie-sanders/
Pete Buttigieg isn’t going to win
You may as well start on his political obituary once you’ve finished with Joe Biden’s
Roger Kimball
FTA:
veryone who is not Bill Kristol understood that the bullet of that purely partisan hit job would miss President Trump. I do not understand why it was not also understood that the Bidens, knee- or perhaps even neck-deep in the influence-peddling nepotism-is-neat corruption biz, would be the prime victims of that bizarre soap opera. Or maybe it was understood and the real point was to give old Joe the shove that he required but to do it covertly. Deep waters.
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The truth is, Buttigieg is about as moderate as Bernie Sanders. He comes off as more reasonable than Bernie because he has a more soothing demeanor. (And he comes off as more reasonable than Elizabeth Warren because he does not sound like a screeching harridan whose hectoring voice is like a witch’s nails drawn across a blackboard.)