Research Fellow  John C. Fortier

Friend, can you spare a nickel? Ten bucks? What if I put you on the installment plan?

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has made more than 250,000 friends this year, and these friends are the giving kind. The sheer number of contributors to his campaign will serve him well in the presidential race, but it also illustrates how very different presidential and congressional fundraising have become.

Obama has continued to exceed expectations, with $32 million raised in the second quarter, on top of $25 million in the first. Most impressive of all is the number of contributors he has amassed--more than 258,000. That number is larger than Howard Dean's donors in all of 2003 and more than twice as many as have given to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) or any other candidate in the first half of 2007.

Obama's raising of small donations over the Internet gains him plaudits as a man of the people and cutting-edge technologist. Story after story can be written about the couple of modest means foregoing a trip to McDonald's to give $10 or the college student coughing up his beer money after being inspired by the "Obama girl" video. And by improving on Dean's online-fundraising techniques, Obama shows that he is not George H.W. Bush, who did not know what a supermarket scanner looked like.

Much more important than the common-man appeal and whiz-bang technology is the fact that Obama has established a huge base of small donors to whom he can return for more money as the campaign progresses. Even if these donors have only bought a $5 Obama button or poster, they have crossed the threshold of opening their own wallets and putting their names on paper. Again following the techniques of Howard Dean, Obama can appeal to these donors when he needs to run an ad or meet a target, and many of them will be open to giving again episodically, if not quarterly or monthly.

Imagine that Obama does not find a single additional donor and that he persuades his current donor list to give the maximum allowed by law (both unlikely events). He could raise nearly $600 million for the primary alone.

The presidential fundraising of the top candidates illustrates how little presidential and traditional congressional campaigns have in common. The old stereotype of a strong presidential fundraiser was of a senator or governor who had established a network of large donors in his home state and who received lobbyist donations in Washington. The candidate spends years establishing the list and hours courting these donors in person and over the phone.

But this kind of fundraising is small potatoes compared to what is needed at the presidential level. If Obama had spent eight hours a day every day on the phone making two-minute calls to each of his contributors, it would have taken him nearly three years to contact each one.

At the presidential level, it is more about crafting a larger message and about systems to capture donations from the buzz that surrounds a candidate. Individual donors can't have their hands held by the candidate. Perhaps the larger donors will get a steak instead of a hot dog. Perhaps bundlers or pioneers or whatever the campaign calls them will get some minor recognition. But no individual is going to get important special favors for giving $4,600 out of the hundreds of millions raised.

The modern presidential campaign, with its huge sums raised and reliance on the Internet instead of candidate solicitation, barely resembles the old-style donor list of traditional congressional campaigns. But the new fundraising may be a harbinger of the way congressional campaigns are run in the future.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at AEI.