Liberal Talk Radio

As you may have heard, Barack Obama raised some serious cheese last quarter. Various pundits have made comments on what this means vis-a-vis Clinton, has he put a chink in the armor of inevitability, etc.

It’s also been noted that Obama raised a good chunk of money from small donors. He had 100,000 donors, about 50,000 on the ‘net. Sen. Clinton, by contrast, had 50,000 total donors. In other words, Obama has strong “grassroots” support.

But what much of this analysis leaves out is that Obama did this without the lockstep support of what they used to call the “netroots.” The online left, a.k.a. the folks who rallied around Howard Dean in 03-04, aren’t all on board the Obama train. No doubt some of them are, but Obama’s whole schtick is that he’s post-partisan, which makes many online lefties skeptical. These folks don’t want someone who “rises above” politics, they want someone who unabashedly champions progressive causes, i.e. Dean, Russ Feingold, and John Edwards v2.0.

All of this is to say that Obama has raised a lot of online money without the wholehearted support of the “netroots.” Which leads to the conclusion that online campaigning has gone mainstream. In other words, giving to a candidate online is like owning an iPod: it was cutting edged in 2003, but in 2007, even your grandmother is doing it.