The Campaign Finance Institute came out with a report yesterday on the funding of the presidential campaign, which for some reason got the story almost entirely backward. In a release, the group harps on data showing that as of the end of August just 26 percent of contributions to the Obama campaign came from those giving $200 or less in the aggregate, a number not too dissimilar from the 25 percent mark achieved by the Bush campaign in 2004. "It turns out that Barack Obama's donors may not have been quite as different as we had thought," the lede of the release reads.
Yet this totally and utterly misses the real story which was that Obama relied significantly more heavily on small contributions than other recent presidential campaigns. Fully 49 percent of contributions into the Obama campaign came in chunks of $200 or less, compared with 37 percent for the Kerry campaign in 2004, 32 percent for the McCain campaign in 2008, and 31 percent for the Bush campaign in 2004.
Why are these numbers, and not those upon which CFI focuses, so important? As Ben Smith notes, squeezing a little more than $200 from supporters in chunks of $25 or $50 through the web has much less of an even potentially corrupting effect than allowing $1,000 or $2,000 donors to meet with the candidate or top advisors. And in the end campaign finance reform is not about numbers or limiting the flow of money into campaigns but rather limiting the corrosive effect money can at times have on our politics.
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