The Barack Obama push in Arizona includes creative fundraising pitch

The last-minute decision by Barack Obama's campaign to air ads in John McCain's home state of Arizona garnered a lot of attention.

More than likely, it spoke to the overflow of cash available to Obama rather than any real expectation among his aides that he can carry the state. But don't tell that to Don Bivens, chairman of Arizona's Democratic Party.

Bivens, via an e-mail that happened to come our way, on Saturday made an appeal for contributions to help fuel the state party's final push on behalf of Obama. And he gave potential givers concrete ways to gauge how their money would be used:

$25 buys an hour of calls.

$50 hydrates 250 door-to-door canvassers.

$250 feeds 60 people who've worked an eight-hour shift.

$1,000 gets gas to transport 100 people to the polls.

$5,000 rents vans to transport canvassers to knock thousands of doors all weekend long.

We remain skeptical that if Obama claims the presidency, his electoral vote count would include a poke-in-the-eye win in Arizona, the way George W. Bush stoll Al Gore's Tennessee in 2000. But we know that English teachers everywhere will applaud Biven's use of active verbs.

-- Don Frederick

To get automatic notices on each new Ticket item, go here and register.

Comments

[Janine]

And the chance (slight that it may be) that Obama wins the state of Arizona....priceless.

[George William Dole]

A GMAT 2006 review question (of 86 words) succinctly foresaw the growth and burst of the USA “Real Estate bubble” and outlined a preventive cure. If Alan Greenspan, the U.S. Executive Branch politicians in D.C. and investment bank CEO’s, read and followed this advice back in 2006 the worldwide banking financial crisis probably would be less severe and might have been avoided altogether.

Here is the 2006 GMAT question verbatim: “In order to understand the dangers of the current real estate bubble in Country Y, one has only to look to the real-estate bubble of the last decade in County Z. In that country, incautious investors used the inflated value of their real-estate as collateral in risky margin loans. When the real-estate market collapsed, many investors went bankrupt, creating a major recession. Country Y is in real danger of a similar recession if more stringent laws restricting margin loans are not enacted promptly.”
*** [Note: GMAT Verbal Test-Bin3 Question #17 is from the book, "Cracking the GMAT", (2006 and 2009 Editions, publisher Princeton Review), in 86 words.]

George William Dole lives in Moscow, Russia. He is a Consumer Market Researcher and GMAT Tutor to Russians who want U.S. MBA degrees.