Why the Republican Party takes a man who lost $300 million seriously amazes me. Karl Rove got one of his cronies, Dick Boyce, the contract to create the GOP’s answer to OFA. Already this venture, named Liberty Works, is off to a bad start. Through a combination of technological ignorance and political arrogance Rove and his cronies are not taken serious by Silicon Valley republicans.
A California investor — with help from Karl Rove — won the highly competitive contest to help build the Republican National Committee’s data platform.
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Since the RNC announcement on May 1, Liberty Works has gotten off to a shaky start. Top engineers in Silicon Valley who have been looking for ways to help Republican campaigns question Boyce’s vision and say the company’s outreach is underwhelming — as are its salary offers.
“At a minimum, they should buy a round or two of drinks before they ask the tech community to get into bed,” said Garrett Johnson, the chief executive of SendHub, an Internet communications firm in Menlo Park.
Liberty Works is also discussing plans to outsource the voter data platform it was charged with building to another company called Originate, POLITICO has learned, further upsetting the GOP tech community.
“You’re not going to get great quality if you keep passing the responsibility down the line,” said Chris Abrams, a Bay Area engineer, who said he met with Boyce and members of his team, including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
[….]Rove’s involvement, while useful in Washington, hasn’t helped appeal to Silicon Valley programmers.
“Karl Rove, to me, doesn’t mean engaging an open-source community,” said Aaron Ginn, director of growth for StumbleUpon, who also worked for the Romney campaign.
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But Rove’s attachment to Liberty Works has raised eyebrows among tea party and other conservatives who worry that he will make it difficult for outsiders to make an impact in GOP politics. Rove has not previously been known for his work in the digital field.
“[F]or all of Karl Rove’s fine attributes, he is also largely a direct mail guy who learned at the foot of Lee Atwater and never really learned anything after Atwater passed,” RedState’s Erick Erickson wrote earlier this month. “I’m just not sure, after the 2012 race, that this is a wise investment. Direct mail guys believe the data is the value, and what Team Obama discovered is that the tools to analyze the data are the value.”
Tags: Karl Rove, Liberty Works, Silicon Valley
