By Emily Cadei, CQ Staff

This campaign season, a few spare dollars can make you the proud owner of a John McCain coffee mug, a Hillary Rodham Clinton “Signature Series” mouse pad or even a button that reads “ Barack Obama ’08” — in Hebrew. The sheer variety of the swag on offer is exceeded only by the number of supporters clamoring for a piece of the presidential campaigns.

The seemingly insatiable demand for campaign merchandise in the 2008 race has been a boon to the candidates. For the first time, they are hawking mass quantities of paraphernalia through their Web sites and pocketing the proceeds, which count as donations under campaign finance law.

In fact, by counting all those people who bought $3 buttons and $20 T-shirts ($20.08 to be exact), Obama was able to truthfully claim last month that 1 million people have donated to his campaign.

And the benefits go beyond fundraising. The sale of gear helps candidates establish their own brands and build a community of fans.

Until this election, presidential campaign merchandising was largely limited to yard signs, lapel pins, bumper stickers and other baubles that the campaigns and their surrogates purchased from third-party vendors and gave away at events. Those vendors also sold campaign gear themselves for a profit.

This time, the campaigns have still been giving plenty of paraphernalia away, but they’ve also leveraged a growing Web presence to reach a population willing to pay for the same gear, plus many more-elaborate items on offer — everything from piggybanks to DVDs, knit hats to fleece jackets.

“That market’s always been there, there just wasn’t any way to get to them,” says Tony Baltes, president of Tigereye Design, an Ohio company that has supplied merchandise to Democratic campaigns for 30 years. “The Internet made it possible.”

Tigereye has contracted with the Obama campaign to provide all its merchandise, and it also fills some orders for his remaining Democratic rival, Clinton. “It would be impossible for a campaign to do this if they didn’t have a contractor like us,” Baltes says, since his company can get several thousand orders a day.

Those orders translate into cash for the campaigns. Obama, whose merchandise has been the most sought-after this year, raised $1.4 million from his online store in January alone. The campaigns for Clinton and the presumed Republican nominee, McCain, did not respond to requests for information about their online stores.

Using the merchandise to expand a candidate’s base of donors is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Tech President, a blog that monitors how the 2008 candidates are using the Internet.

“The Obama campaign has certainly demonstrated the use of merchandise for branding and as an added incentive to attract donors,” Rasiej says. But that is part of a larger phenomenon, which is to offer Internet users “more ways to engage, participate and feel part of a community.”

The Clinton and McCain campaigns have tried to emulate Obama’s success in community building, including through their own, less elaborate, online stores. And Congressional candidates are starting to follow suit — Democratic Senate challengers Al Franken in Minnesota and Tom Allen in Maine both sell an array of apparel on their Web sites.

But candidates may want to hold off on placing too many bulk orders for key rings and T-shirts just yet. Merchandising to voters, cautions Rasiej, “will only succeed if the brand, itself, is considered something they want to associate themselves with.”