Where have I seen this before … where? It appears as though Barack Obama is playing the numbers game. He claims that 90% of his donations come from small donors. At the same time, the Federal Election Commission says that half of the money he has raised comes from heavy hitters – contributions of $1,000 or more.
Who’s right?
It’s and old game. Both are telling the truth, though Obama is deliberately trying to mislead us. Of all the people who have given him money, 90% have done so in small increments. But of all of the money he has raised, half of it came from large donations.
Obama is talking about the number of donors, the FEC about the amount of money raised.
Obama is trying to give us the impression that he is running a little guy’s campaign. Not true.
Piece of Mindful 
Actually, Mark, you’re offering the fallacy of False Dichotomy. The one circumstance (large money donors) does *not* invalidate the other (large numbers of small donors). As with all fallacies, it leaves the truth value of your position indeterminate. The enormous number of small donors does indeed suggest that Obama is telling the truth about running a ‘little guy’s’ campaign.
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Gots to get you out of the logic 101 class – do you carry the crib notes with you? There is no fallacy here – my contention is that Obama is playing to public perceptions, trying to leave the impression that his campaign is funded by little people, like you and me. To do this, he’s playing with numbers. You’re saying he technically right, and he is, but that’s irrelevant to the perceptions game.
If he were being honest, we would state that half of his money comes from the big boys, half from the little guys. But notice something interesting here – candidates never talk about large contributions. Only small ones. Please, if you would, list the fallacy behind “elephant in kitchen”.
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This is the part I don’t get; you say he’s playing with numbers by promoting his status of having gained contributions from a record number of small donors. There’s no game there. He has. You assume that people who donate $1000 are ‘big boys’, an assumption that is arguable from the start, and point out that since half the dollars come from said donors that his campaign isn’t really about the ‘little guy’. If 9 people donate a dollar, and one guy donates $9, it is a cynical falsehood to claim that his campaign serves or is indebted to the guy with the ten-spot. There is no evidence to support that theory.
In Obama’s case, he really is energizing a record number of supporters (supporters defined as those who give money). At no point have you shown that Obama isn’t running a campaign of and for those people, though you claim he is lying about it.
If 90% of his donations are from small donors, which they are, I don’t see a lie or obfuscation, nor have you illuminated any reason for him to tell said ‘lie’. So the question is, really, what would be the point of him doing so?
{Kindly keep in mind that you are having this discussion with someone who is *not* an Obama supporter. I haven’t made any solid decision yet. And I am a little disappointed that those who have embraced Obamania haven’t chimed in here yet.}
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Actually, both of you guys are wrong. Obama is using the Chinese Family Scam. That’s the scam the Clintons invented, where one crook gathers all the money from a few donors, redistributes it in various amounts to family members, who in turn write multiple checks of different amounts to Obama. It can look like ten people or a thousand people or whatever. There’s no telling where the money is coming from.
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(If I remember right, Shane wrote a post complaining about Rehberg playing this same game.)
Lies, damn lies … First, half of his money comes from big money people. You misunderstand the game if you think a $1,000 contribution is really that – they are really $2,300 contributions, and they are bundled by executives of corporations so as to have more impact on the candidate. The object is to focus the power of that corporation on the candidate. In Obama’s case, his top donors by that method are Wall Street banking houses, and over half of his money has come from such bundled sources.
Now every campaign wants these piddling little contributions, but they don’t have much clout – though it does look good. It’s just unfocused money, no strings attached, like federal matching funds. They will take my $10 or $50 knowing that it looks good to have a lot of small donors. But you lose sight of the big picture. With Hillary, it’s the health care industry, with Obama, it’s money houses. That’s where the game is being played. As Matt Taibbi pointed out in his Rolling Stone article, the real campaigns take place behind the scenes, and real deals are being made, and you’re naive if you think Obama and Clinton aren’t deeply involved.
Now I suppose you want some sort of proof that money equals influence. Of course it does.
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