From an Obama gathering in Silicon Valley:

I raised $55 million last month. 90% of that was over the Internet. 50% of the donations were under $50. Many people give what they can, $25 per month, like a tithing. I have 1.3 million individual donors and no PAC or lobbyist money (unlike Clinton and McCain).

You’re seeing this phenomenon of ordinary people being empowered politically in a way we have not seen before. It takes power away from PACs, from lobbyists. It takes power away also from institutional players. Endorsements from a governor might not mean as much as it once did. Endorsements from some of the traditional institutional players, even those that are part of the Democratic Party, may not mean as much. That is actually a healthy thing.

Even the organizations that I care deeply about, the Democratic special interests, the stalwarts, the ones that share my values, they become dogmatic after a point in time, and they start expecting everybody to check off a list of whatever their pet projects are. And we are starting to break that down. And that’s what I mean about midwifing a new kind of politics.

We need to separate money from political influence. It’s an experiment in open source politics.