Mistakes happen. Ask Joe Biden. But two things about the state of digital presidential politics jump out of what is otherwise a trivial affair.

The first is that, as is fairly common in Republican campaigns, the Romney organization keeps its digital team relatively small, preferring to outsource work where possible. The Romney technology operation, while growing, is a fraction of the size of its counterpart in Chicago. Part of it is free-market thinking: The best and the brightest in coding/design/data are likely to be working in the private sector, where they are perfecting their crafts in well-resourced environments. The strategy, said Romney digital director Zac Moffatt in an interview in January, dictates that "we go out and find companies whose size we can leverage, experts we can work with, that let us be much larger than our size." Now, "With Mitt" was built in-house. Outside companies tend to charge a pretty penny for mobile-app development, even on something as simple as this. But running lean and mean might mean that there are simply fewer internal checks and balances when it comes to a project like this.

One wouldn't really want to be the consultant who made that sort of error, not with a boss who says things like, "I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."

The second is that the Romney app mess highlights the challenges of doing political work in the mobile space. If the error had been made on MittRomney.com or even on the campaign's Facebook page, the offending language could have been updated within seconds of the mistake's first spotting. But the Apple app store works differently. Apple has full approval rights over every bit of what appears in its store. There's a trade-off there. Mobile apps can be enormously powerful, offering perks such as the ability of the Romney app to tap into an iPhone or iPad's built-in camera. But the Apple mobile model also puts Cupertino in a position to act as gatekeeper to a degree that doesn't really exist on the web. One imagines several nail-chewing hours at the Romney campaign headquarters in Boston spent waiting for Apple's California reviewers to wake up and sign off on scrubbing of the boo-boo from its app.

In the end, it took about half a day for the Romney campaign to get Apple to push through an updated app where the "A Better Amercia" overlay had been dropped altogether. Measured against today's hypermetabolic political news cycle, that's just about forever. But Romney's lucky. It required more than three months and a Pulitzer Prize for political cartoonist Mark Fiore to get his app approved by Apple. It turns out it's good to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States of Amercia. Or America. Whichever.

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