Obama Lands a Solid Left Jab

Here's the e-mail I got signed by Barack Obama tonight:

Subject Line: Inevitable?

Yellow Dog Democrat,

I'm leaving the Tonight Show studio and I wanted to share something.

Jay Leno just asked if it bothers me that some of the Washington pundits are declaring Hillary Clinton the winner of this election before a single vote has been cast.

I'll tell you what I told him: Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare "Mission Accomplished" a little too soon.

We started this week $2.1 million behind the Clinton campaign -- a lead they built in large part with contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.

We don't accept money from federal lobbyists or PACs. But thanks to your contribution, we've already cut that advantage in half.

Let's close the rest of that gap now. Please make another donation of $100:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closingthegap

Thank you,

Barack

(emphasis added)

That's a solid left jab where I come from. Comparing Clinton to George Bush in a very visceral, burned-image-in your-brain kind of way. It's also a message that could do some damage with Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats. They take their caucuses and their early primaries seriously. They believe they better understand the candidates and the issues better than the lower 48. They take pride in their independence, and they don't like to have their vote discounted or taken for granted. They also like underdogs. Obama's message could cause Clinton troubles.

The second-to-last paragraph also caught my eye:

We don't accept money from federal lobbyists or PACs. But thanks to your contribution, we've already cut that advantage in half.

First because it reminded me of Glenn Poshard's problem when he unilaterally disarmed his fundraising against George Ryan.

And then I realized that Obama was telling me that he raised $1.05 million in a single e-mail. That's right, Obama sent out just one e-mail Tuesday morning, and in less than 36 hours he raised over $1 million. Unreal.

Assuming Obama raised an average of $100 from those donors, he must have had 10,500 people respond, assuming the e-mail went out to 3/4 of his 352,000 donors, or 264,000, that's a 4% response rate. Pretty darn good. If he can keep up his current pace of adding 90,000 donors a quarter and get a 4% response rate every week, he'll raise nearly $18 million just off the Internet by January 1 and he'll be raising almost $1.5 million off the Internet starting in 2008.

Barack Poshard?
Poshard was nailed by Ryan on trumped up charges that he violated his own pledge, let's see if Hillary tries to put some chinks in his armor. Of course, if she does, Obama is likely to strike back and attack Clinton for her fundraising. I'm betting she's getting alot of money from insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, so opening that debate could be a Pandora's Box.

I also have to wonder if Poshard might have been able to out-raise Ryan in 1998 if the Internet were at its current level of political penetration.

Chambana
One of the best fundraisers I ever knew was a guy known as The Old-Timer who did an old-time bluegrass show on WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign. The Old-Timer raised more money than just about anybody, except News From Neptune, a show further to the left than anything you'll ever find. I figure if the Old-Timer could nickel and dime his way to the top, Poshard could to, if he could reach a large enough audience cheaply and conveniently enough.

News from Neptune, btw, was followed immediately on air by the Illinois Labor Hour, the only radio show I know of in Illinois dedicated to covering the labor movement on a weekly basis. During the strike years in Decatur in the early 90's, before the World Wide Web (invented at U of I) took off, the Illinois Labor Hour was the best source of coverage of the strikes at Staley, Goodyear and ADM, and it was a critical organizing tool for labor activists building community support and recruiting student volunteers.

A little Illinois Political Trivia: The Old-Timer was a member of the U of I College Republicans with the late Senator Stan Weaver. News from Neptune is co-hosted by former Green Party Congressional candidate Carl Estabrook, and Illinois Labor Hour is hosted by Bill Gorrell, organizer for Laborers International Union of North America #703.

Union tradesmen made up a big section of WEFT's weekday audience, tuning in from noon to 3 pm weekdays for the Blues slot. The D.J.'s were all live, all volunteer, and if you called in with a request, they would play it if they had it. And they had just about everything.

Are Community/Public Radio still Relevant?
This week happens to be pledge week for a lot of public/community radio stations. Alot of people wonder if broadcast t.v. and radio are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the era of cable television and the Internet, but what's surprising is that while traditional t.v. and radio stations have seen their audiences shrink, public television and radio have seen their audiences grow in recent years.

Maybe because its one place we can get away from Brittney Spears?