Romney Contribution Page uses jQuery flipCounter with Hardcoded Values

Who cares?

Maybe they look at the donation amounts every day and update a variable on that page. It's a simple solution that accomplishes their goal and doesn't require an expert to set up the JS socket needed to keep it live updated.

This link doesn't teach me anything interesting about startups, technology, or even the election for that matter. An elementary solution to a design problem on a politician's donation page doesn't impugn the politician in the slightest.

Whether or not your for or against a particular candidate isn't my concern, but this seems like you're trying to create a political scandal over nothing in an entirely inappropriate venue.

It is common practice to separate server and client side code like this. The back end just outputs the result of the query into the javascript.