Laughable Political Excuses and Unthinking Comparisons

Just before Christmas, a leading Republican Presidential candidate was handed a lump of coal for his stocking when the Virginia Republican party announced he, and several others, had failed to submit the prerequisite number of valid signatures to secure a place on the ballot.  The required number was 10,000 registered Republican voters.  Mr. Gingrich submitted something like 11,050 names but not all were registered as Republican voters and those were thrown out.

Since then there has been a broad frontal attack that a) Virginia’s primary is “a failed system” when it excludes a front runner from being the ballot, b) he would pursue a write-in campaign.  Today he, and his campaign manager, is comparing this setback to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  To that I have but one thing to say – Phooey. 

The attack on Pearl Harbor was on one side a brilliant military operation executed with precision, and from a US standpoint a failure in our intelligence community and government to anticipate correctly where or when Japan would initiate hostilities.  Those failures cost over 2,000+ American lives.  The Gingrich campaign’s failure to get on the ballot was plain and simple a failure in the campaign and for that the fault must lie solely with the Candidate.  There was no opposing unforeseeable brilliance that stopped him.  Yet I don’t see a lot of acceptance of failure on the campaigns part.

The campaign must have access to a statistician, don’t they?  Surely someone would know what the probable rejection rate on petition signatures would be?  Wouldn’t a prudent campaign look to eliminate that risk by submitting enough signatures to account for that?  Ron Paul and Mitt Romney seemed to have broken the code on what was required.

If you and your campaign are not smart enough to figure out the rules of the game and then meet or exceed the minimum requirements are you really smart enough to be President?
Update:  Today (12/29/11) The candidate's story is one of his workers, paid to get signatures, committed fraud.  Now he's just another victim.