Republicans have two choices if they want to have a shot of beating Barack Obama:
- Find a billionaire willing to spend at least $2 bil. of his own money;
- Get real public financing passed for all federal elections.
It’s safe to assume that Obama will raise over $1 billion for his campaign alone next cycle. The GOP is in serious trouble and watching them try to deal with this is going to be fun. The bar has been raised out of their reach and they’ll have to do better than proposing to steal the “change” brand. But again, I’m all for Republicans hanging their hopes on branding and whining about how awful it was that millions of small dollar donors carried Obama to victory.
Hold Fast 
Mr. blogger:
The “small donor” meme was debunked a few days ago by the LA Times, which called it a “myth”: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/obama-money.html
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Andrew —
That really isn’t a debunking. I mean, if percentage of donations is not the same as number of donors being the same. Obama had many more small donors than Bush – that the percentages for the two were similar is not relevant.
So I guess if you’re willing to take a study which looks at the wrong numbers in a misleading way, it’s debunked.
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But what you don’t mention is the LARGE DONORS. Why don’t you tell us the numbers for Large donors compared to Bush?
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I don’t care about large donors. But my guess, not having compared the FEC filings of Bush and Obama, is that Obama had more large donors than Bush. And?
Obama has set a fundraising bar that will be hard for a Republican challenger to meet. You haven’t suggested otherwise, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make in contrast to my post.
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You know exactly what the point is that I’m trying to make. Why didn’t you say that “donors” carried Obama to the presidency? you attempted to write a feel-good post focused on the people-friendly small donors as opposed to large donors. In my neighborhood, they call that “cherry-picking”.
Again, who carried Obama?
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Small donors, volunteers, and activists carried Obama. There were more small donors than large donors. Large donors gave more money. None of this is revelatory.
But whatever, you don’t like the post, fine. Would you care to address the actual issue of the post? Do you doubt that Obama will eclipse $1-1.5 billion next election? I’m willing to posit that the overwhelming majority of those dollars will come from a subset of the donor base. I’m predicting that, again, Obama will have multiple millions of small donors.
Where will the Republicans find the money to match that? A self-funding billionaire? Real public financing? Tell me, I’m genuinely curious.
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Republicans are screwed for a long time because of Bush’s policies. My problem was with the Obama ’08 vs. Bush ’04 comparison regarding donors.
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Was it really so long ago that Sen Obama supported public financing of campaigns? I guess that particular position is no longer operative?
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