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TaoPoohBear -> RE: How did Obama get to where he is today? (6/28/2008 12:59:39 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Sophie11
Interesting Article.
Not sure if it helps or not though, still reading it now.
WoW!!!
Thank You! That explains alot!
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The campaign’s focal point is My.BarackObama.com, which has made better use of technology than its rivals since the beginning.
The alchemy of social networking and the presidential race has given Obama claim to some of the most fabulous numbers in politics: 750,000 active volunteers, 8,000 affinity groups, and 30,000 events. But the most important number, and the clue to how Obama’s machine has transformed the contours of politics, is the number of people who have contributed to his campaign—particularly the flood of small donors. Much of Clinton’s haul, and McCain’s, too, has come from the sort of people accustomed to being wooed in the living room, and Obama initially relied on them, too. But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain.
In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat.
Powerful stuff. At the right place, and at the right time.
But give Obama credit -
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Staffers credit the candidate himself with recognizing the importance of this new tool and claim that his years as a community organizer in Chicago allowed him to see its usefulness.
Obama may have seized an obvious opportunity, but he was also smart enough to use it to keep himself from beholden to special interests. Makes you wonder how much of the negative press he gets is from companies & organizations he's spurned. It puts him above the fray, something our (mostly rich) founding fathers took for granted.
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