One of Obama’s ’08 fund raising secrets

I reread an interesting couple of pages tonight in Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Well, actually more than a couple.

In 2006, Anita Dunn was brought into the unofficial, unannounced Obama campaign to help with fund raising. We all know who Anita Dunn is. But what many don’t know is that she was the chief strategist for former Senator Bill Bradley’s 2000 presidential run and Senator Evan Bayh is also a former Dunn client.

One of the things that made the Obama campaign unique and successful, and a lesson I’m sure the Republicans have learned since the ’08 election, was their aggressive use of the internet, especially for fund raising.

After the 2004 DNC speech that launched Obama into the stratosphere, he was in demand to speak and help raise money for several mid-term democrats. What she did to bring his Senatorial PAC alive again, was to require that every time he appeared to help a candidate, the email addresses of those in attendance was gathered up for Obama’s Hopefund.

“Everytime he did an event for a candidate, Hopefund would require the beneficiary to set up a registration system and then turn over the attendees email addresses to the [Obama’s] PAC.

“This was no small thing. As 2006 rolled on, the requests poured in – urgent, desperate pleas from Democratic candidates fervent in the view that a visit from Obama would be their fiscal and political salvation. That added up to a lot of chits, and a lot of email addresses.”