On one hand its nice that Obama has apparently built up a volunteer team so that it can ignore (or thinks it can) the typical Philadelphia machine process, on the other hand there's merit to the complaints that spending money on media rather than people is problematic.
Street money is a weird thing in elections. I think all of our first instincts are to react negatively to it, but what's really going on is that you're paying campaign workers for a day of work. In practice it's a bit messier than that of course.
