[Pearls Before Swine]

Yes, there were many articles glorifying the superiority of Obama's data team re that used by the GOP (Romney's in 2012).

Here is a link to a particularly laudatory and detailed article from MIT's Technology Review (2012):

How Obama Used Big Data to Rally Voters

From what I've heard, if there is a problem with what Cambridge Analytica did, it was using "one-time" or specified use data over and over. That's a contractual problem separate from the invasiveness of using such data in the first place, which was encouraged by Facebook (and probably Google). We know it was encouraged, because they sold it to all comers!

[IBD editorial writer]

Exactly correct.