The news that 224 people (out of roughly 500,000) had contributed a total of approximately $39,500,000 (roughly 40% of the total) to the DNC/OfA campaigns in the second quarter of this year is, of course… interesting; but it doesn’t really drive home the implications of such high-powered ‘amateur’ lobbying being done by the bundling elite that’s doing such wonderful work for the Democratic party.  We need something that highlights the situation, as it were.  I therefore propose that political pundits adopt the obama as a mathematical value, where the obama is defined as “$175,000, or the approximate value of a Democratic bundler.”  That gives the actual Obama campaign a second quarter value of 227 obamas, which isn’t quite right – but, heck, this isn’t actually higher mathematics.  Or even lower mathematics, so hush now.

Where this will be useful is in looking at the ratio between Obama’s obama number and the obama numbers of his current opponents (which we will call the Democratic Hypocrisy Index, or DHI).  To use the Politico article’s examples above: Mitt Romney collected $517,000 in obama-measurable donations, while Pawlenty collected $70,000.  That gives Romney a value of 2.95 obamas (more or less), and Pawlenty one of .4 obamas – which gives Mitt a DHI of 1.3% and Tim one of [.2]*%.  Put another way: this means that whenever Obama complains about big money donations to the GOP, he is being almost seventy-seven times more hypocritical than his target when he’s talking about Mitt Romney, and a staggering [five hundred and eighty-eight*] times more hypocritical when he’s talking about Tim Pawlenty.

Obviously, the President needs for that DHI number to go down, somehow.  Alas, that won’t happen as long as he’s leaning on Democratic elitist moneybags to keep his campaign afloat…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: The term that you are trying to remember is ‘millibears.’

[* Fact-checkers have corrected my bad math slightly: it’s still bad math, but it’s more accurate bad math.  Much obliged. – ML]