This morning, the Beachwood Reporter's Steve Rhodes posted a press release from the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) with a "sigh."  The underlying study found that, while the number of small contributions (less than $200) received by Barack Obama was unprecedented, the share of his donor base who remained under this threshold over the course of the election cycle was on par with George W. Bush in 2004.  The discrepancy is due to what CFI dubs "mid-range repeaters":

Many of the repeat donors who started off small ended up in the $201-$999 middle range. Among Obama's total pool of 403,000 disclosed donors on August 31, more than half (about 212,000) started off by giving undisclosed contributions of $200 or less. About 93,000 of these repeaters gave in cumulative amounts of no more than $400 for the full primary season. Another 106,000 repeaters ended up between $401 and $999. By comparison, Clinton and McCain each had about 100,000 donors in the entire $201-$999 middle range, and for them the number included both repeaters and one-time givers.

Obama critics/skeptics are sure to use this study to argue that Obama's financing system simply represented more of the same and that the "small donor" buzz was, in CFI's words, a "myth."  But as Politico's Ben Smith notes, those mid-range repeaters are themselves a phenomenon worth noting.  Indeed, while they ultimately exceeded the $200 threshold, they still represent a break from the access-oriented fundraising that has dominated most presidential campaigns:

I think I must have been buying into the wrong myth, because this doesn't really debunk the thing I'd thought was key about Obama's fundraising: That it was, to a higher degree than in the past, web-driven, rather than dominated by high-dollar events at which donors buy access (though there were still a lot of those). The relationship between the candidate and a random citizen who gets $500 squeezed out of her by a series of desperate emails from David Plouffe isn't all that different from the relationship between the candidate and someone who gave $10 to buy a key ring at a megarally -- there's no access bought, no implied promise of favors, and no opportunity to ask for a favor.

On the other hand, the relationship with old-fashioned donors who write checks at events, including to Obama, is different. They bought time with him or with his top staff, and developed relationships with professional fundraisers part of whose job, in turn, is traditionally to seek perks for donors.

Those old-fashioned donors' influence really was diminished, and significantly, this time. Though Obama did rely on donors who gave $1,000 or more for nearly half of his money, he didn't need them as much as earlier candidate have, and they knew it.

As I've written before, future campaign finance reform shouldn't involve banishing big donors and special interests from the system, but rather figuring out a way to provide a counter-balance that lessens their influence and boosts that of average Americans.  Say what you will, the Obama campaign appears to have done just that.