Those of us on Barack Obama mailing lists have wondered why the masters of fundraising haven’t stopped pushing for more donations. After all, Obama won … last week. Recounts won’t affect the substantial victory; this isn’t 2000. Yet we keep getting e-mails, supposedly from people like Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and especially David Plouffe, telling us that Obama and the DNC desperately need more of our money — and Andrew Malcolm does the math. He reprints the missive from Plouffe:

Here’s what he said: “We’ll get to work transforming this country. But first, we need to take care of the DNC.” Did we hear that right? Now that Obama’s the president-elect, the top priority is the Democratic National Committee? To drive home the point elsewhere in the same e-mail Plouffe adds: “Before we do anything else, we need to pay for this winning strategy.” Don’t worry, you still get the Victory T-shirt for this $30. But it sounds like pretty much everything else is on hold. This change stuff is looking to be an expensive process, even before it gets started.

The DNC raised $100 million dollars on top of the $600+ million raised by Obama. The latter was a record-breaking number, and the DNC’s wasn’t too bad, either. Instead of simply spending what they raised, though, Howard Dean took out massive loans that left the Democrats in the red by $15 million.

In government, we call that deficit spending, something Democrats decried during the 2006 elections. And who gets to pay for all the overspending and fiscal mismanagement? The contributors who already coughed up record amounts of money for Hope and Change, that’s who. And the new administration will hold the Hope and Change hostage until it gets all of the loose change possible first, Plouffe tells us.

In a way, this is truth in advertising. The Democrats have given us a clear example of how they will govern for at least the next two years. In fact, we may all wind up wearing shirts that say, “The government took all of my wealth, and all they shared was this lousy T-shirt.”