Obama outsmarted the righties, it's that simple

http://www.epolitics.com/2009/05/15/learning-from-obamas-financial-steamroller-how-to-raise-money-online/
I don't know why but Linda wants to talk about Obama's donors. I think the righties are just jealous of Obamas strategic and masterful campaign victory and it makes them crazy!



Obama’s platform may have envisioned a grand reform of the political system, but the primary change he brought to political fundraising was to do more of it than anyone in history:

3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once…Obama also raised millions from traditional campaign bundlers — rich, well-connected fundraisers — but the bulk of the more than $600 million that Obama raised throughout the campaign was through the Internet, aides said. (Some of those bundlers, of course, also arranged for donations to be made online, so there is some overlap.)
“Obama Raised Half a Billion Online,” Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post, 11/20/2008

That last line is key: “online” doesn’t necessarily mean “small.” In fact, early in the primary season Obama had already assembled a network of big-money bundlers, fundraisers who tapped social and business connections to solicit large checks from other wealthy people. Obama’s big donor program accelerated as the general election approached, and regardless how many millions of small donations arrived over the internet, the bulk of the cash he raised in the end — some 75% — came from people who gave $200 or more over the course of the campaign.
Let’s tease two different ideas out of these numbers. First, it helps a campaign immensely if most individual donations, even the big ones, come in online rather than as paper checks. Money collected via credit cards is available instantly, allowing a candidate to take immediate advantage of an overnight surge in income. Plus, online donation details automatically end up in a database, simplifying accounting and reporting — a serious concern in a campaign environment in which the press and bloggers pour over a candidate’s FEC filings online.
By contrast, physical checks present an immense logistical burden, since each one has to be processed individually whether it’s collected at a fundraising dinner or arrives in the mail. Had Obama’s financial tsunami come in on paper, the process of opening, logging and depositing it would have overwhelmed just about any political staff in the pre-internet era. The time delay might have been equally fatal, as Gary Hart found out after winning the New Hampshire primary in 1984, when a surge of donations arrived too late to help in the next round of elections.
Another point: many (most?) Obama donors who gave more than $200 did so over the course of months rather than all at once. They tended to part with relatively small amounts repeatedly, which in turn is why a small-donor list is such a valuable resource — it’s the gift that keeps on giving, quite literally. Unlike traditional big donors who often reach their quota for a given candidate with a single check, small donors can contribute repeatedly, providing a financial consistency that’s priceless in a years-long campaign.
This dynamic was already apparent on the Democratic side of the presidential race by September of 2007: Hillary Clinton’s strategy of wrangling big money from traditional Democratic sources was beginning to max out, but Obama was able to return to his much larger list of grassroots donors again and again. By 2008 and the general election, his enormous pool of donors and volunteers provided Obama with a tremendous advantage over John McCain, with results decisive both financially and at the polls.
Of course, Obama’s supporters didn’t give that money all on their own — they were the target of a series of emails and other contacts stretching over the course of a year or more.

Cultivating the Grassroots

As we’ve already seen, the Obama campaign turned volunteer mobilization into a science, and it’s no surprise that they took equally great care in managing donors. The main tool they used to solicit money? Email — it’s not hip, it’s not sexy, but it absolutely worked. Of course, every communications tool from direct mail to Facebook no doubt played a role, but the campaign’s fundraising workhorse was a combination of email and a website — some two-thirds of the money they raised online was directly attributable to an email solicitation.
While anyone can send out a message asking for money, it takes a professional operation to manage virtual relationships with millions of people over a period lasting many months without burning them out in the process. Any activist database experiences “churn” as old members drop off and new ones join, but mismanagement can turn churn into flight. The Obama solutions: analytics, technical skill, experience and tactics.