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Much has been made of Dean's high-tech campaign approach. Indeed, he has used the Internet to great advantage, building a campaign of volunteers (according to literature I received recently from the Dean campaign) of 480,000 people. Moreover, he reports that more than 200,000 Americans have contributed an average of $77 each to the Dean campaign.

That kind of grassroots giving is amazing at this point of the campaign, especially when one considers this: According to a Campaign Finance Institute study cited in USA Today on July 20, 2003, "only about 600,000 people contributed any amount to the 2000 presidential candidates. That's a third of 1% of the voting-age population." (According to the same article, big donors - classified as those who gave $750 or more -- accounted for 74% of Bush's funding and 65% of Gore's funding in the 2000 primary.)

Things have gotten even more interesting in the past few days. I continue to get direct mail from Dick Gephardt's campaign. One piece continues a common theme of Gephardt literature: quotes from news sources that keep repeating that Gephardt is the candidate GOP strategists most fear. (Dear blog readers and political insiders, is this true, or is this - as someone recently suggested to me - just GOP strategist disinformation to get people to endorse Gephardt, who Bush really thinks he could beat?)