Klein: We Asked Obama for Change, Got Lousy T-Shirt

Guess who tweeted this: “This Black Friday, take 10% off all purchases ... with code 10%TURKEYDAY.”

Wal-Mart? Best Buy? A hedge fund trying to unload Greek bonds?

Nope. That was the official Twitter account of President Barack Obama -- excuse me, President @BarackObama. And it’s not the first time that Obama’s 2012 campaign has sounded like a commercial for Al’s Used Car Lot.

Last month, “Barack Obama” e-mailed me with the subject line “Last chance at dinner.” “Because you and I don’t have a lot of chances to have dinner together,” Obama -- or, more accurately, a campaign worker claiming to be him -- wrote, “I hope you’ll take advantage of the one that’s coming up this fall.” Then he asked me to donate some money so I could be entered into a raffle to have dinner with him.

Another e-mail from “Obama” carried the subject line, “If I don’t call you.” Again, the lure was that you could donate money to be entered into a dinner raffle. As Garance Franke-Ruta noted in the Atlantic, the e-mail writers at the Obama campaign had taken one of the most distinctive voices in American politics and reduced it to the whine of a plaintive boyfriend.

This is, of course, a fundraising effort. And it’s working. The Obama campaign has received donations from more than 1 million individuals, 98 percent of whom contributed $250 or less. At this point in the 2008 race, the Obama campaign had fewer than 400,000 donors. “This is what a grassroots campaign looks like,” the campaign brags in a graphic celebrating the million-donor mark.
Token of Thanks

Some of those donations purchased Obama swag. When you buy a hat or a shirt, you’re technically donating to the campaign, and the campaign is sending you a token of its thanks. There’s something tawdry about it. This isn’t transformational politics. This is, almost by definition, transactional politics. You give me money for my campaign, I give you a beer can holder with Vice President Joe Biden’s face on it.

I asked the Obama campaign about that seeming disconnect, but didn’t get much of a reply. “We don’t talk specifics about merchandise because we don’t talk specifics about fundraising in general,” Katie Hogan, the campaign’s deputy press secretary, told me.

In a sense, these e-mails and tweets -- and the exasperated reactions many supporters have had to them -- perfectly encapsulate one of the biggest challenges Obama faces going into 2012: resolving the yawning chasm between the sort of politics America wanted from the Obama campaign and the sort of politics the Obama administration has found to work in Washington. Plymouth A/C compressors
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