Thank you, Mr. Mitchell for debunking this report. It was obviously poorly reported – and the poor reporting was evident to any of us SMALL DONORS who actually contributed more than $200 over time.
I signed up for a recurring donation of less than $20 and made occasional extra contributions – how do I not count as a “small donor?” All this report reveals is the need to change the definitions – which is exactly what one would expect out of such a transformative campaign.
Particularly – I would like someone to explain just who these “bundlers” are. I know Obama had some of the traditional bundlers, union folks and the like, who bundled thousands of donations together. But what about the fact that Obama was able to create “small donor bundlers” – enabling small donors to reach out to friends and families and bundle their donations? How are those donations counted?
The Los Angeles Times report that Obama’s small donor base is not really all that impressive. Personally I find their reporting not all that impressive. People who donate $200 are indeed large donors, but I donated (a total – across the primaries and general election) of $263 or somewhere around there. My largest single donation was $30, and that was a splurge.
Further – some of that money (roughly $30 worth) was contributed across 2 or 3 donations to a “bundler” – one Mr. Bob Cesca, who rallied commenters on his blog site (of which I am one) and raised a little better than $10,000. Mr. Cesca is not a “bundler” in the common sense, nor is his “bundling” in any way common. Mr. Cesca was able to use an online tool created by the campaign to bundle donations made directly to the campaign but in his name.
In short – we are still the “little people” – who did tremendous things. the L.A. Times could do some homework and find out what those numbers really mean, because it makes a world of a difference.
Where is Nate Silver to analyze the numbers when we need him!
Yes, I know. I’m slow as molasses with blog posts these days. Part of it is that I’m playing catch up with a bunch of stuff (HOMEWORK!) and part of it is that the election is over, and I’m regrouping and thinking about what this blog is going to be (or IF it’s going to be) going forward.
I think there’s more to do with the Obama Project, but it’s going to take a minute or two to think about how I want to proceed. After all – we no longer have a candidate Obama. We now have a President-Elect Obama, and soon, a President Obama. So there’s a bit of reflection to be done, and some consideration to whether or not I’m really going to make a 4 year commitment.
Anyway – if anyone is here and wants to chime in with thoughts on what this blog can or should become, feel free. I’ll be posting my thoughts here as we go along.
The excitement astonishes presidential historians.
“I can’t recall another situation where there is this kind of interest before the president even takes office in terms of where he is going to go to church, and churches campaigning for his attendance,” said Gary Scott Smith, author of “Faith and the Presidency” and a history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. “This is unique in American political history.”
The historic nature of the new First Family — as the first African Americans and the first in decades with small children — plus Obama’s high-profile difficulties with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is placing unprecedented attention on the family’s choice of a church. Normally, say historians and members of previous administrations, the selection rarely raises a ruckus.
Well, I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and whenever there is news of that church, I have a hope that they will be successful. Of course, Obama came to faith in the United Church of Christ, and I think that he will be more comfortable there. And – I have a strong desire, as part of demonstrating black culture to the wider American audience, for the Obamas to choose to worship in a black congregation.
That said, if the Obamas want to be really outside the box, perhaps they’d like to drop in on the DC Baha’i community! Ok, he couldn’t run for re-election if he became Baha’i, but there have been Baha’i political leaders here and there, so you never know! LOL!
We have been through all this before. Candidates who promise to bring everybody together are talking about meeting in the middle. The only people who think Barack Obama is a radical are you and Joe the Plumber.
One guess at what group feels they were robbed of “meaningful gender identities,” and thus likely long for them with a much greater intensity than the rest of the populace. It’s quite likely that the same impulse that would attract men by the hundreds of thousands of men to the Million Man March–the sense that something had been lost–is the same impulse them that would lead them to reject an expansion, and to their mind, a redefinition of marriage.
A very good point. Another: the feeling that black people’s marriages are persistently under attack. A clinging to traditional marriage as a cure for some of the ills that affect black people is a characteristic of black America that is under-appreciated.
After all, traditional marriage isn’t just analogous to sex discrimination—it is sex discrimination: Only men may marry women, and only women may marry men. Same-sex marriage would transform an institution that currently defines two distinctive sex roles—husband and wife—by replacing those different halves with one sex-neutral role—spouse. Sure, we could call two married men “husbands” and two married women “wives,” but the specific role for each sex that now defines marriage would be lost. Widespread opposition to same-sex marriage might reflect a desire to hang on to these distinctive sex roles rather than vicious anti-gay bigotry. By wistfully invoking the analogy to racism, same-sex marriage proponents risk misreading a large (and potentially movable) group of voters who care about sex difference more than about sexual orientation.
After all, many opponents of same-sex marriage don’t oppose gay rights across the board. In California, same-sex couples enjoy significant civil rights protections and legal status as domestic partners, and voters have shown no interest in changing that. National polls show that overwhelming majorities support employment-based gay rights, including equal access to careers in the military, and same-sex civil unions. It’s only when it comes to marriage—the word, with its religious as well as civic connotations—that pro-gay sentiment dwindles: Recent polls show that only 30 percent to 36 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. It’s this finding, of course, that the results of last week’s elections echo.
The sharp differences in the polling numbers, depending on whether the question is marriage as opposed to almost any other gay rights issue, suggest that opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t simply the 21st century’s form of racism. After all, whites who opposed racial miscegenation in the Jim Crow South didn’t support other civil rights for blacks or civil unions for mixed-race couples. In fact anti-miscegenation laws worked hand-in-glove with laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage and intimate cohabitation of unmarried adults to effectively outlaw interracial intimacy altogether. When Mildred Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, successfully challenged Virginia’s law barring interracial marriage, they were not just fighting for social acceptance and hospital visitation rights. They were fighting a jail sentence, suspended on the condition that they leave the Virginia and never return together: effective banishment from the state. Anti-miscegenation laws were designed to prevent intimate racial mixing of any kind; by contrast, many of the people who voted to ban same-sex marriage are apparently supportive of same-sex intimacy—provided you don’t call it marriage.
Coates is not overwhelmingly persuaded, but I quoted more than he did because I think there’s a “there” there.
Are there some things that just make you smile? I smile at things sometimes – just because they make me happy. I can be moody as all heck, but the upside of that is that I’m very easily made happy.
Google Earth is one of those things. Its sorta like flying – which I only sometimes get to do (usually when my boss is paying for it), only better, because you can get so much closer to the ground.
The purpose of this blog is to avoid partisan politics but to talk about this time – the effect of the Obama candidacy on our country. I’ve focused mainly on race, though I’d hoped to get into discussion of gender (Sarah Palin helped me focus there a bit) and the wider discussion of culture – proposition 8 brought out a culture discussion, but I also hoped to talk a little bit about some of the right in front of our face happenings – like when Obama brought the house down doing his brush his shoulders bit. What a moment!
The Republican Party is having a bit of an identity crisis as a result of the Obama and Palin candidacies. Sarah Palin rallied the religious conservative base of the Republican party while wholly alienating the conservative “elite.” Given a choice, I’d choose that “conservative elite” – education and thoughtfulness deserve to be not only acceptable, but preferred qualities. Barack Obama exemplifies both, which in the long run thrilled his supporters (more on this later!). But the landslide victory of Obama over McCain was partially the result of African Americans and Latino voters going overwhelmingly for Obama. Combine that with an overwhelming youth vote favoring Obama, including a good chunk of evangelical youth, and you can see the problem the republican party is having – demographically they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
The internal debate on this very issue has begun – with Gov. Michael Steele, one of the most prominant African-Americans in the Republican party – stepping up to run for the chairmanship of the party. And here is a debate between Pat Buchanan and a republican strategist – who happens to be African American:
