If that whole Michael J. Fox vs. Rush Limbaugh=Claire McCaskill Wins a Senate Seat thing taught us anything about the current state of American politics, it’s that support from the right star is perhaps the most valuable commodity a candidate can claim. So when Nikki Finke posted this list of the dollar amounts donated by various Hollywood stars to their chosen ‘08 candidates, I knew this information had to be reordered. It doesn’t matter how many celebrity donors a candidate has, or how much money each celebrity donates–what matters, is that they’re the *right* celebrities.

So: behold the chart embedded above. Obviously, my draftsmanship is impeccable, and my methods extremely scientific. The formula: I took the list posted by Finke, and used IMDbPro’s STARMeter, which ranks Hollywood players by recent activity and search popularity, to assign each celebrity a numeric value. Any celebrity donor who fell outside IMDBPro’s Top 5000 celebrities was thrown out of the equation (sorry, Ruby Dee). The stars were then assigned a point value based on their IMDbPro rank:

Top 5000 (ie: Pauly Shore, Oliver Stone) = 1 point
Top 1000 (ie: Danny DeVito, Val Kilmer) = 3 points
Top 500 = (ie: Ben Stiller, Jodie Foster) 5 points
Top 100 = (ie: Will Smith) 10 points

I then added up all the points, fired up Photoshop, and made the chart.

Mapped out in this fashion, the statistics are not totally unsurprising. In terms of Hillary’s donors, Tom Hanks (who has a STAR rank of 31) nets 10 points; his wife, Rita Wilson. has a STAR rank of 1,455 and nets 1; Marla Maples who ranks at 5,560, nets zero. Mrs. Clinton has a greater number of celebrity supporters than Barack Obama, but Obama’s donors are of greater star stock–specifically, the one-two punch of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith helps push him over the edge. Mike Gravel has only one celebrity donor, but as it’s A-minus-list actor Mark Ruffalo, that handily pushes the obscure Dem ahead of both Rudy Giuliani and Dennis Kucinich. Ron Paul is all the rage on Technorati and YouTube, but until he convinces at least one Hollywood type to throw their vote away, he’s not on our chart.

Surely more lists like this will appear between now and next November, and I’ll chart them all! (Until I get bored, and/or forget.)