@PeterWolf, @andre @wrenchwench

No, it’s not a racist comment. I’m not for hiring or firing people in political campaigns (the only job I’m talking about here) on the basis of race; I’m for recognizing the harsh reality that people from your own political persuasion have to be hired if you want to do a good job.

While many of you are idealistic and pious about this, those in the industry at least get the fact that they can’t force people who don’t like Romney to make apps for Romney:

3dblogger.typepad.com

I’m not the one to blame for the harsh political fact that 96% of blacks voted for Obama. That’s the Republican Party’s problem, and it’s also the demographic delivery of Obama’s analytics people. If race has become a marker for political belief, that’s unfortunate, but you can’t go on living in some Sesame Street episode that pretends that someone who has a nearly 100% likelihood of voting for Obama is going to work with enthusiasm for a Republican campaign. It’s not about firing people from their jobs, discriminating, or profiling. It’s about asking what kind of world we live in when one party entirely captures a demographic base, brags about it and sets up a narrative where those few minorities who might have wanted to vote for Romney will be branded as traitors to their race or ethnic group. I’m not the one who invented that world; Jim Messina is the one who invented that world. Jim Messina has a huge secretive machine that turns out people who “look just like you” in your neighbourhood and then persuade you to vote for Obama. That’s politics in the real world, except now it has an acceleration and an amplification — if everybody in your neighbourhood and your Facebook is blaring messages for Obama, and operatives who “look like you” are out in the field calling you and knocking on your door night and day, are you really going to feel you can vote for anyone else?

The company that in fact coded the failed VP announcement app leans all towards the Republicans. The CEO said frankly that his company, which is top in their industry, would not give the job to someone who hates Republicans. And that’s more than the Democrats are saying, and most geeks lean left. Those arguing this on forums are saying “you’re racist for even talking like this” or “we’re going to rely on professional ethics to solve this problem”.

I realize your felt need to go on forums and take a star turn and denounce people you think are racists and feel good for the day that you did your bit to deter racism. Except Silicon Valley has not hired any more black engineers as a result of your smugness; and the American public does not have secure, neutral and accessible campaign and voting tools in the new digitalized age of elections.

You invoke the notion that people will display their professionalism and ethics. Will they? I don’t believe you. Unlike government service, they sign no oaths. Unlike some big public companies, they sign no ethics manual. Unlike some professions, coders and engineers and digital designers have no self-regulatory body or even informal campaign that pledges not to DDOS people they don’t like. With Anonymous rampant everywhere, you can’t know who is coding that app — they may mispell Romney’s app with the word AMERCIA because they want to damage him.

You can dismiss people who raise these issues like me as cranks or nutters, but I always voted for Democrats all my life and for the first time ever voted for a Republican president. Among the reasons was the personality cult of Obama and the socialist culture brought to so much of the “community organizing” straight out of the manual of the Socialist Scholars conferences of the 1980s (which Obama attended, and so did I, that’s how they are recognizable to me.)