Tuesday, July 17, 2007

BARACK OBAMA

Is the Secret To Obama's Large Donor Base Just Caps and Key Chains?

So everyone has been marveling at how many individual small donors Barack Obama has attracted...

...except it turns out, the Obama campaign is counting them differently from every other campaign:

Mr. Obama had said goodbye to a less exclusive crowd of 10,000 that had gathered to hear him speak across the bay in Oakland. They paid nothing to hear him, but spent $40,000 on Obama T-shirts, baseball caps, buttons and other knickknacks. And the Obama campaign registered each of the purchasers as one of the record 258,000 contributors it signed up in the first six months of the year...

But to capitalize on his celebrity, Mr. Obama’s campaign has also employed novel tactics — like counting sales of $5 speech tickets or $4.50 Obama key chains as individual contributions — to pump up his numbers and transform grass-roots enthusiasm into more useful forms of support. No other campaign is known to have listed paraphernalia sales as donations.

How many people have bought Rudy, or Romney, or McCain, or Hillary or Edwards caps, bumper stickers, etc., and not written a check to the campaign? By the Obama campaign's measure, aren't all of his rivals under-counting their donors?

My bet is every other campaign will soon adopt this tactic, and next quarter everyone else will be reporting a surge of small donors... which are otherwise known as people who buy the knickknacks.

Also raising something of a question - if you donate the maximum $2,300, and then buy a key chain, have you donated more than the legal maximum?

UPDATE: This is getting interesting. Jerome Armstrong - formerly a Mark Warner guy, if I recall correctly - seems irked that Obama is measuring his grassroots engagement by number of donations. Armstrong notes that Dean did it through e-mails and MeetUps.

07/17 10:21 AMShare