Oh, @ByronYork, you made eye contact.

Never make eye contact.

…hoping to get a better look at Democrats’ small-donor technique, I finally clicked the $5 contribution box on President Obama’s email.

You’d think that would have made them happy. But no — they immediately wanted more.

First they tried to get me to increase my contribution. I declined. Then they asked that I make my contribution an automatic monthly donation. I declined. And then, when it looked like $5 was all they would get, they asked for a “tip” for the pro-Democratic fundraising group ActBlue. “We’re building an army of small dollar donors to defeat the Koch brothers and their fat checkbooks,” they said. “Your tip of 10 percent or more will help us build the next generation of our tools so the Kochs don’t have the final say.”

And it goes on from there. Bottom line: if you think that the hectoring, desperate, and just plain creepy emails are bad now*, try actually giving them a small amount of money. Byron’s lucky the Democrats didn’t threaten to boil his rabbit if he didn’t up his donation.

Moe Lane

PS: It is, indeed, a great way to raise money. What it is not is a great way of getting people elected.

*Many of us actually are signed up for Democratic emails, on the reasonable grounds that it allows us to see what the Democrats are trying to fundraise off of. I assume that many Democratic political operatives do the same thing to us, for the same reason.