Evaluating the 100-Day Plan

8 June, 2008. 342 words.

I was scanning Jeff Frederick’s 100 day plan for the Republican Party this past week, and I came across this sentence:

“An important part of the best-practices will be to include tested and proven methods for reaching out to minority communities and youth.” (emphasis mine)

I previously knew nothing about Jeff Frederick, but when I saw those red-flag phrases I thought to myself, “This guy must have been a technology manager in a former life, because only a Pointy-Haired Boss would throw around meaningless buzzwords like that.” Imagine my surprise when I scrolled down a bit farther and found:

“My years of running an information technology company will enable me to personally ensure that we are getting exactly what we need for as few dollars as possible.” (emphasis mine)

Nailed it! A brief survey of GXS.net (not to be confused with GXS.com, a much larger corporation he’s probably hoping people will mistake him for) tells me he’s probably a fast-talking salesman who knows bupkis about software development except how to build inferior products held together with spit and duct tape. I mean, look at his client list (an ASP page). He’s putting freakin’ campaign web sites on there, which any schmoe can slap together in a weekend with a domain name, open source software, and off-the-shelf clipart. Some of those client sites consist of a single page. (Also, a random sampling of sites showed they are prone to W3C validation errors, which is indicative of poor web development skills and/or poor attention to detail.)

Hrm, that might hurt my chances of winning any of his planned “competitively bid” projects. Oh well.

One other interesting quote:

“We will also use primary election participation to establish a party ID rating.” (emphasis mine)

A Web 2.0 community rating system for Republicans? Nice. “I’m way more Republican than you are! My rating proves it!”

UPDATE 6/12: Just to clarify, I wasn’t smearing Jeff Frederick’s Republican credentials or ability to lead the Republican Party of Virginia, I was smearing his ability to produce high-quality web applications. :)

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