What I really want to talk about however is a new phenomenon in campaign fundraising this cycle of giving gifts to donors. This quid pro quo offers donors an added incentive when considering giving to candidates. A potential donor might ask themselves, “do I want to spend $75 on a John McCain mousepad or $18 on the Hillary Clinton “kid pack” including ruler, pink piggybank and “Hillary cares about me” kid t-shirt? Sure, I’ll get more use out of the mousepad, but the piggybank is just so cute!”

If you give $50 to the John Edwards campaign you can get a country-bluegrass CD featuring Bruce Hornsby and Emmylou Harris. The CD, which is about the plight of America’s rural poor, seems to echo the themes of Edwards’ largely populist campaign, and the “kid pack” for Clinton’s campaign seems also to echo her emphasis on children (does anyone remember her first book?), what then does the John McCain mousepad say about him?

The trend is of course a reflection of the election more than of the candidates. Potential ‘08 candidates are going to have to raise money in the $100 million range in order to stay afloat and will need to tap a whole new population of donors who may be swayed by having your spinning class meet with Bill Clinton (a Hillary Clinton incentive for the legal limit of $2,300/person) or winning a video ipod (the incentive for the top college student fundraiser for the Mitt Romney campaign). I swear, when I found out I could get a red, white, and blue peace t-shirt for giving only $20 to the Kucinich campaign, I nearly wrote a check, of course, if I save my money maybe I can go spinning with Bill Clinton.

Sydney is co-editor of www.RealityCheck08.org.

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The Blog Herald: latest blog count hits 70 million blogs, we predict that Blogpulse is poised to become Technorati slayer with new service, Italian Blog network Blogo lands Ducati as a sponsor and report on a new service that promises to transmit blogs into space

The Gadget Blog takes a look at the Gigabyte G-X5 slider and gSmart mobile phones, Windows Vista, and the Panasonic Viera TH-42PV500A Plasma TV

PVRSpot gives Media Portal 0.1.3 the thumbs up and warns that Pop-up ads are coming to TiVo

The Search Engine Herald reports on Google’s announcement that it is going to Open Research and Development Center in China, Google’s record search numbers and Yahoo’s loss of staff.

And last but not least, the best from Donklephant: Montag asks when did Marijuana labs become political in What Does “Liberal� Mean in this Context?, Justin covers Jon Stewart and linguist George Lakoff, Callimachus takes a look at the growing comments on pro-Iraq war political blogs where bloggers are being challenged: “You support the war, so why don’t you go over there and fight it, or else shut up?� in Chickenhawk Meme and stirs up a hornets nest, and gets an incoming link from Instapundit as reward in the challenging series of posts starting with My Left Behind.

The eminent domain case is pop culture’s mistress this week (day?)…

Take a closer look?

Found via In The Agora.