The New York Times Magazine boldly pushes the 'post' envelope today by applying the erstwhile prefix to yet another totally still existent thing: money. See, these days, says fresh-faced political reporter Matt Bai, it doesn't matter how much of it a candidate has. According to his piece, "The Post-Money Era," that's the electoral implication of this whole Web 2.0/You Generation/"the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win" thing that people have been talking about.

Bai's basic gist is money no longer matters, because "in this new world, the most effective political ad makers may be amateurs like Phil de Vellis, the Internet consultant who recently took it upon himself to make a powerful pro-Obama ad, based on a famous Apple spot from 1984, that portrayed Hillary Clinton as Big Brother. The ad, which de Vellis made on his Mac in a single afternoon, ricocheted around the Web, reaching millions of Democratic voters. It cost nothing."

"Amateur" is, clearly, a pretty heady concept: what Mr. Bai leaves out of his piece is that De Vellis is about as much an amateur in terms of his political experience as former President Bill Clinton.

Sure, De Vellis made the 1984 ad on his Mac, but that doesn't change the fact that he is a political consultant by profession—that is, back when we were still in Web 1.0, he was working for the D.C based internet strategy and communication firm Blue State Digital, which provided nerdy computer stuff to Richardson, Vilsak and...Obama. But hey, he'd quit the biz—shot out on his own, blazed his own trail. After he was outed by HuffPo, he explained why he made the internet-wide sensation that shook the foundations of the American political scene:

"I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it—by people of all political persuasions—will follow.

According to Mr. Bai, the New Model hardly puts a dent in today's political coffers, leaving most of the millions to do their real job: get reported on. "Money still confers legitimacy on a candidate among the media and party activists," Bai writes, arguing that the really pressing issue for political strategists today is how a candidate can most conspicuously consume all of his/her purely symbolic capital. What with all the amateur post-professional high-tech political apparatchiks doing your pro-bono po-mo pro-mo for you, what's a candidate to do with the likes of a hundred million?

The best possible thing: go to the moon. Just imagine: "CLINTON 2008: I WENT TO THE MOON!" Now that would confer legitimacy.—LUX