We noticed overnight that Sen. Stabenow (D-MI) is now raising money (for the DSCC) from her exchange/smackdown with Sen. Kyl over maternity care. And it occurred to me that while we could certainly find many of examples of this over the past few years by one definition or another, the pattern of piggybacking a fundraising campaign on top of a viral video or meme has suddenly come of age. The two boffo fundraising efforts tied to Rep. Joe Wilson’s ‘you lie!’ outburst were perhaps the breakthrough examples.
Again, I know it’s not entirely new. But it does seem to me that the viral news nugget pathways have sufficiently matured and the rapid fire one-off fundraising technology has been perfected enough that the whole thing has somehow come into its own.
Am I on to something here or all wet?
If you’re on Twitter, definitely follow me at twitter.com/joshtpm. I keep you updated on the best offerings of the day from our news blog as well as give updates on new stuff we have coming from TPM — new features, hires, stories we’re going to start digging in on, etc.
I’d also strongly encourage you to follow the main TPMmedia twitter feed which we’ve just relaunched — ditching the old extremely lame RSS-based system and placing under new bona-fide homo sapiens management.
You may have seen that there’s a new meme afoot in the news world which has it that the mainstream media either ignores or is insufficiently ‘in touch’ with the right wing noise machine of Fox, Drudge, Glenn Beck, etc. What’s notable however is that the idea seems to be emanating from the folks at Politico whose founders’ theory of the media is that its narratives are largely defined by Matt Drudge and who used Drudge as the key vector to build their national audience. I’m not sure how these two facts compute.
As key milepost in the health care reform effort: The Senate Finance Committee will take up amendments to add a public option to the Baucus bill. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
The former President compares the toxic opposition to Obama to what he himself faced in the 1990s. Watch.
Accused billionaire Ponzi schemer Sir Allen Stanford is back in jail after being treated at a hospital for injuries sustained in a prison fight with another inmate.
After going a few rounds with that federal judge down in Georgia, Orly Taitz is asking to withdraw as counsel for the former client who already denounced her to the court so that she can break her attorney-client privilege.
We’ll be talking about this more over the course of the week. But if you look at various polling data, it seems there’s a pretty decent chance that Congressional Republicans got well ahead of themselves in their collective August freak-out. A number of polls have shown that over the course of August — well in advance of the president’s relaunch of his health care push — opposition to reform peaked and support began to rebound. What’s more, the president’s approval rating — and particularly his approval on health care reform — has started to rise. And in what could be a critical development, the latest polls are showing a growing number of Americans beginning to credit the President’s stimulus package with helping to revive the economy.