This misses a key point, which is that the Obama campaign relied heavily on small donations from _individuals_ in contrast with the heavily superpac funded Romney campaign which pulled from a small set of extremely wealthy donors (admittedly conjecture based on being an avid political news junkie). So, we're talking about crowd-sourcing a president; this is an encouraging direction, even if one finds the overall amount spent to be distressing.
Obama had the same superpac corporate support that Romney did. The whole emails asking people to donate $3-$5 was to bring his average donation rate down.
