Hillary Clinton‘œGod bless the America we are trying to create.’ ‘“ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hillary Clinton hasn’t officially bowed out of the presidential race, but yesterday was still a sad evening in our household. The Hillary sign came down in our front yard. I figured the neighbors might smirk if we immediately erected an Obama sign, but I wasn’t quite prepared to make the street smile with a new placard. We’ll eventually get his name out there.

In the meantime, I’m reflecting on what went wrong and early on in the race, a lot of it had to do with money. A month ago, TIME magazine indicated she had made five crucial mistakes. One happened to be that she relied on old money:

For a decade or more, the Clintons set the standard for political fund raising in the Democratic Party, and nearly all Bill’s old donors had re-upped for Hillary’s bid’¦ But something had happened to fund raising that Team Clinton didn’t fully grasp: the Internet.

Though Clinton’s totals from working the shrimp-cocktail circuit remained impressive by every historic measure, her donors were typically big-check writers. And once they had ponied up the $2,300 allowed by law, they were forbidden to give more. The once bottomless Clinton well was drying up.

Obama relied instead on a different model: the 800,000-plus people who had signed up on his website and could continue sending money his way $5, $10 and $50 at a time. (The campaign has raised more than $100 million online, better than half its total.) Meanwhile, the Clintons were forced to tap the $100 million ‘” plus the fortune they had acquired since he left the White House ‘” first for $5 million in January to make it to Super Tuesday and then $6.4 million to get her through Indiana and North Carolina.

Andrew Tobias echoed the same sentiment. As treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, he’s the DNC’s highest-ranking openly gay official, I asked him if he saw money doing anything good when it came to the political process. His answer:

Sure. Politics is tacky and all the awful things it is ‘” but you can’t have democracy without politics, and politics requires money. That said, it’s wonderful how the balance of power is shifting away from the $500,000 and $5 million contributions (now illegal) ‘” and even the $28,500 contributions (the current annual max to a federal political party like the DNC) ‘” to the potential for millions of $10 and $25 and $100 and $250 contributions over the Internet.

Until Hillary, I had never given money to a political candidate. So a couple of months ago Jeanine and I gave individually over the Internet after being prompted by a friend forwarding the pleas from HillaryClinton.com. After we gave, the real benefit was that we received daily emails from (wink, wink) Hillary. I actually looked forward to this communication because it was a message direct from her campaign that hadn’t been filtered and recounted by the pundits. For my 100 bucks I felt like I was in the know. It made me feel a part of something.

Obviously, Barack Obama figured this out sooner than the Hillary camp. I have to give his people credit. ‘œChange we can believe in.’ He did it with a little more than pocket change. $5, $10 and 20 bucks a pop.

So what about you? Did you give? If so, how much? And what prompted you to click the ‘œContribute’ button?