Today I received an email from Barack Obama aka the democratic party email account at democrats.org and it was yet another email silently asking for a donation! Really another email from a DMC affiliated group asking for money!? What a surprise
This is the email and my response, unsubscription:
I get that political campaigns need funding but I think fundraising is way out of hand! In the beginning of 2008 when Barak Obama began his campaign, it was a grass-roots type of campaign. Making the best out of the few millions he had gathered to run a campaign to get the democratic nomination. At the time, he use some powerful tools, such as online social channels and email lists, that would eventually become main stream in politics. The power of YouTube and Facebook, gained the candidate a lot of attention. Various groups chipped into create content (User Generated Content) in support of the candidate for free! Fast forward to 2012 and all that human capital has been traded by obama and the Dems for cold hard cash.
Even “Obama Girl” retracted her support for Obama!
The political campaigns for both parties are forgetting that “social capital” matters a lot and that a good campaign can be ran with out spending a billion dollars to pay for media time.
2008 was also the year when a candidate raised a record breaking three quarters of a billion dollars! This year the trajectory of fund raising efforts seems to indicate that Obama may raise a Billion or close to it. Look at this chart from the NY Times:
By July both Obama and Romney have over half a billion in the bank and that does not even include the amounts that will be raised for August, September and October which in the past are the months when the campaigns raise the most money!
I don’t know about you but I think that anything over $250 million dollars spent on a popularity contest is absurd. I think the right amount of money to get a message out in today’s world to reach the majority of households in the US is about 150 million. Actually, you can even get a massage out with less money if you resort to mobile and online advertising as opposed to the expensive and antiquated traditional media channels. Anything more than that is just a plain waste; preaching to the choir. At the end of the day the people seeing the ads are not the ones choosing the president; it is the electoral collage that needs to be impressed. All the public needs to know, is that the guy in the White House is trust worthy so we don’t have a rebellion and people know the system works.
The question I have now is why the independent party does not get organized and becomes a legitimate political party in the US? Oh yeah, because no politician in their right mind wants to be labeled an independent, unless you have over a billion net-worth. Sigh…