Obama Rakes It In

Obama has taken the lead in the Democratic field for the number of campaign donors, acquiring 93,000 new ones and raking in $20 million this last quarter. Though Hilary has yet to release the amount of funds she's raised and she's the fore-runner of the Democratic candidates, Obama has out raised her. Some of the donations have been as little as $5, but that doesn't seem to matter when you've had 352,000 donors. Five dollar donations seem to suggest that Obama is reaching out to more "everyday people", not just your big business people looking out for themselves in the future. He has had large fundraisers just like the other presidential candidates including a "$3 million fundraiser with talk-show mogul Oprah Winfrey, an event with mega-investor Warren Buffet and a low-dollar match program where the campaign united small donors with people who matched the amount the smaller donor could give", according to an article by the Washington Times, but he does have the most donors, a sure sign of popularity.

I thought this cartoon was a perfect representation!

There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's American ignorance!

Oh, Newt. While I'd like to think you took my advice last week and realized that raising $30 million in 3 weeks was impractical, I'm sure that was not the case. I won't argue the importance of your political action committee, American Solutions, or the difficulty of obtaining funds this late in the race...

...ut I can use your reluctance as an example of what I think is most disturbing about American politics.

Take, for instance, CNN's most prized headline this chilly evening, which (perhaps discretely) applauds Sen. Barack Obama's $20 million (and possibly more) fundraising blitz this quarter. The not-so-shocking amount puts the not-so-inexperienced senator at about $74.9 million this election cycle.

For anyone interested in the math, that amount would cover nearly 44,600 AU students' financial tabs... yea, tell me about it...

Anyway, the amount, in my mind, really forces us to reconsider the age old question: to whom are the candidates most accountable or responsible? Sure, we'd like to believe in the merits of basic democratic theory, that our electoral system only allows the most qualified and (or) popular candidates to assume office. But what about the thousands of interest groups, PACs (like Gingrich's) and businesses who donate the most money to presidential candidates? It's true; the larger one's coffers, the better one's chances at securing success in the primaries.

I mean, this isn't always the case; Howard Dean and John McCain, in their earlier runs for their respective party's nomination, far outdid their competition. But for the most part, donations produce votes. Fundraised dollars means advertisements and canvassings, appearances and stump speeches, bigger staffs and more ambitious goals; more showiness, more political grandeur, more pageantry, all of which is uncharacteristic of real grass roots democracy.

And when the media hypes earnings, they give the impression that the candidate with the most money is indeed the most popular. Granted, this is sometimes true (or near true), as a recent CBS poll of the Democratic field would demonstrate. But any publicity is good publicity. Why would an able minded middle or low income American donate a large sum of money to a candidate (who perceivably promised adequate representation of their demographic) the media depicts as losing or already lost? It's paradoxical, to say the least.

So when I hear the big guys like Gingrich and Obama lambasting the political system while fretting over much-needed campaign dollars, I start to wonder whether this whole "we're going to change American politics as we know it!" scheme is nothing more than an excellent sound byte. You can't change America's election structure if the most contact you have with the country is the random debate and the occasional thousand-per-head dinner. It's about time someone realized that...

If only I could raise $30 million in three weeks...

According to CNN's Political Ticker, Newt Gingrich announced Monday that he would enter the campaign if donors contributed "at least $30 million... over a three-week period starting Monday and ending Oct. 21."

But before you all experience a euphoria-induced blog-o-seizure, let's think about Gingrich's chances should he enter the 'invisible primary.'

As most of you have probably noticed, a couple battleground political states are waging a rather subtle yet important war. Each vying to overtake New Hampshire for the title of 'first primary,' preliminary elections are moving closer and closer to the beginning of 2008. I've even heard CNN refer to what was known as 'Super Tuesday' as 'Super Duper Tuesday' (thanks, Wolf...) because the primaries now resemble a sort of national referendum on the candidates.

That effectively leaves Gingrich four months to campaign; a hurdle that underlies the effects of unequal media (in)exposure during the primary process.

And let's not forget Gingrich's $30 million challenge. As of June 30, 2007, the top two candidate in terms of fund raising, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, campaigned for nearly $35 million and $33 million, respectively.

In other words, Gingrich hopes to do in three months what the current candidates have been doing for well over six. That's a little too idealist for me.

I mean, I, like anyone else, want to see a competent man or woman elected to the office of the president in 2008. I, again like the rest of this Web site's bloggers, hope the person who makes the grade does so fairly and openly with as much discourse as possible. But there is a fine line between idealism and pragmatism. Gingrich should run, but he needs to tone down his expectations if he wants to be successful; expectations are usually the reasons candidates fail. And he has to remember that despite his criticism, the system is what it is. He can hate the present state of political discourse and lambaste the insular primary or donor systems all to the approval of voter applause, but he has to play and rely on the system if he wishes to fix it. Tis the irony of politics.

The political clock is ticking, Newt.