All Those Obama Donors

In every stump speech Barack Obama brags about the "more than 250,000 donors" who have contributed to his campaign. Next time you year that, you might want to refer to this (h/t Best of the Web):

Just moments before he arrived [at a $2,300-a-plate fund-raiser in San Francisco], Mr. Obama had said goodbye to a less exclusive crowd of 10,000 that had gathered to hear him speak across the bay in Oakland. They paid nothing to hear him, but spent $40,000 on Obama T-shirts, baseball caps, buttons and other knickknacks. And the Obama campaign registered each of the purchasers as one of the record 258,000 contributors it signed up in the first six months of the year. . . .

To capitalize on his celebrity, Mr. Obama's campaign has . . . employed novel tactics--like counting sales of $5 speech tickets or $4.50 Obama key chains as individual contributions--to pump up his numbers and transform grass-roots enthusiasm into more useful forms of support. No other campaign is known to have listed paraphernalia sales as donations.

So, I guess the thousands of people who bought CDs from my quartet over the years should actually be listed as donors to HolyCoast.com...