The Washington Post have already published an excellent article on the machinations behind a Papal conclave, and how they have changed over time. I highly recommend you take a read. As they quote in the story:

Officially, Ratzinger’s selection was attributed to the will of God, a force not amenable to any empirical test that is in our power to conduct.

Which is really quite some claim to a mandate.

As seen in the window of a bookshop on Lambton Quay this morning.

One of the less popular choices.

One of the often missed pieces of news from the US elections last week was that Puerto Rico voted to become an official state of the United States. Of course, that does not yet mean that they are anywhere near being offered statehood, but it is work thinking about.

And of course, the most important question that it raises is: what would the flag look like with a 51st state?

The Smithsonian is running an interesting article about what an American flag with 51 stars might look like. Have a read, there are some great options out there!

Anything that could be measured or analysed was put under the microscope. This, he said, was the big development made by the 2012 campaign. Messina told the conference that his camp spent $100 million on technology alone. That’s what you can do when you have more than a billion dollars to spend. In fact total spending by both parties and Political Action Groups (PACs) over the last two years is estimated at $6 billion.

Jealous.

Called “Orca,” the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado.

Instead, volunteers couldn’t get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign’s headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

As one Orca user described it to Ars, the entire episode was a “huge clusterfuck.”

The article goes in depth into some of the many failures of the project. Bad planning, testing, implementation and user training are all abundantly clear.

However, from my perspective, the attached video interview with Romney Communications Director Gail Gitcho (see below) is far more interesting. Given, this was a pre-election interview, and she is obviously trying to over-hype their capabilities and seem more tech-savvy than they may actually be (of course, we’ll never know how tech savvy the Romney campaign was, but the Ars Technica article is fairly damning).

I fundamentally think their GOTV strategy is wrong. They don’t get it. I’ll leave it for you to draw your own conclusions, but enjoy watching the interview…

Update: One point I forgot to mention, was that I really hope that the failure of Project Orca doesn’t become a scapegoat for the entire campaign. There was a lot that went wrong for Romney, a fair amount of which was totally outside of his control. Having worked in IT, I know what projects like this can be like, and I know how easy it will be for some to sling blame at the IT team. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccwyKIuUWBk

Mark Ferguson at the British website LabourList has written a list of five lessons that Labour can take from the Obama victory. While our MMP system means that we need to have a nationwide focus, and can’t simply pump all our energy into marginal areas as they do in the UK and US, I believe there are quite a few similarities between the lessons Ferguson has identified and the New Zealand situation. I highly recommend you read the full article, but for now, here are his five lessons:

1. Polling works

The first point, polling works, is never going to win an election in New Zealand, but it certainly can help. Unlike in the UK and the US where polling is used to identify marginal areas and the issues important to them, electorate level polling is a far less important tool in MMP situations.

2. GOTV works

The failure of Romney’s GOTV effort is an interesting one, and I may write about that more in depth in future. In any country where turnout is gradually decreasing, smart GOTV efforts can make all the difference. Of course, this won’t be an issue any of my Australian colleagues will take any notice of!

3. The ground war beat the air war

Here Ferguson is advocating for the effort of volunteers on the ground as opposed to fancy television ads. With our very regimented campaign broadcasting system (and the accompanying public funding), we have a far “fairer” system. Which means that by default, the “ground war” is always going to be vitally important. What form that takes is a matter for debate.

4. The debates matter (but not too much)

This should be a point that few New Zealanders would challenge. In 2002 the polling worm essentially got Peter Dunne back into Parliament with a menagerie of United Future MPs who would have never thought they actually had a future in Parliament just a month earlier. Ultimately it didn’t change the composition of the government – but it did effect the race in a noticeable way.

5. The government doesn’t always lose when the economy is in a mess

This is going to be something the Labour Party in 2014 pays attention to. We can’t simply rely on National’s economic mismanagement to get us over the line.

President Obama’s fairly grim, toothless, meandering and perfunctory presidency gained excellent contrast from an assemblage of GOP candidates so demented and corrupt that even to so describe them would be an insult to the many hard-working demented and corrupt politicians extant today. It was an array of desperate, shambling criminals (and Jon Huntsman, who presumably was there on a bet) that may have been unprecedented, even in the stinking cesspool of American politics, in its lunatic evil. The “winner” of the GOP race was always going to be the one who didn’t shit themselves on stage. But the GOP itself couldn’t win, because, of the bunch running, the best you could hope for was a candidate who didn’t shit themselves on stage.

Which is exactly what the Republican party got. A man who’s only coherent when he’s lying. Any solid political points he might have made have been washed away in a tide of dissembling, flipflopping and outright bullshitting. Broad swathes of the party fail to summon enthusiasm for him. The Koch brothers, who could surely have amassed mighty forces to Romney’s advantage, have provided only perfunctory support. And his mealymouthing about Big Government have put him on the wrong side of not only New York but also New Jersey, whose well-liked Republican governor Chris Christie has been effusive in his praise of the President even as Romney was being pelted with his own words about disbanding the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

My concern is this. The radical elements in the GOP will be able to claim that Romney was never their guy, and will take the next four years to place some genuine nutters, with serious backing, in line for the 2016 candidacy. Not the scrag-ends and barrel-scrapings they slapped on to the stage for this year’s farce. The idea of the Democrats being conscious and organised enough to have a real player in place for 2016 – because there’s no way in hell they can run Joe Biden — is kind of funny.

David Miliband has joined forces with his party leader brother Ed behind Labour plans to deliver a “living wage” of well over £7.20 an hour – rising to more than £8.30 in London – for millions of workers in both the public and the private sectors.

The Miliband brothers, whose relationship has been tense since Ed narrowly defeated David in the 2010 leadership contest, are working closely together on how to make the living wage – as opposed to the lower minimum wage – the new norm and a core economic policy for Labour at the next election.

Miliband the elder, who is still outside the Shadow Cabinet, seems to be returning to the fold. This sort of “re-unification” of the British Labour Party can only be seen as a good thing, and puts the party in a stronger more united position to take the fight to the coalition.

Here in New Zealand, Labour Leader David Shearer pledged his support for the idea six months ago. With wages static and costs rising, it is easy to see the Living Wage being a big part of the conversation come 2014.