Is Obama’s $1 Billion Campaign War Chest Just A Media Pipedream? – OpEd
By Jim Kouri
Last year, a number of news outlets heralded the prediction that in his re-election bid in 2012 President Barack Obama’s campaign would raise “an unprecedented” $1 billion in campaign contributions, but in the month of June the Obama re-election team was beaten for the second month in a row by Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s team in the race for garnering campaign cash.
On Monday, Obama’s re-election campaign claimed it raised a whopping $71 million in June. However, the Romney campaign brought in $106 million, in large part due to the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the unpopular Affordable Care Act, known to Americans as Obamacare.
While June’s $71 million is touted as being the best fundraising month for Obama and the Democratic National Committee, Mitt Romney’s fundraising is said to be astounding considering in May he also beat Obama in the race for cash by hauling in $77 million to Obama and the DNC’s $60 million.
“[W]e still got beat — and not by a little bit,” Ann Marie Habershaw, chief operating officer for Obama for America, said in a press statement on Monday.
“If we lose this election, it will be because we didn’t close the gap enough when we had the chance,” she told Obama’s supporters in the hope more contributions will pour into the President’s war chest.
According to political strategist Mike Baker, it’s not known exactly how much money Obama for America has in the bank, however the Obama team claimed it had about $100 million in the bank compared to the Romney campaign’s $160 million.
“In 2011, Obama’s sycophants in the news media and college campuses predicted their candidate would raise a phenomenal amount of cash. But that was then and this is 2012 and voters see a president attempting to win re-election by using class warfare, fear, divisiveness, and near lawlessness. Who wants to fund that kind of campaign except diehard leftists, labor unions, and malcontents?” asks Baker.
He points to just one news story out of many: an analysis by Reuters on April 4, 2011, that was carried by hundreds of newspapers throughout the world. The article quotes one of Obama’s biggest supporters: “In 2008, he was very much an insurgent candidate, somebody from out of nowhere with a wholly different story. And the Obama campaign was as much a crusade as it was a traditional campaign for president,” said Christopher Arterton, a professor of political management at George Washington University who has also been a Democratic consultant.
The same news story states: This time, the former Illinois senator is no longer the fresh political face seeking to become the first black U.S. president. His 2012 campaign will be a bigger, slicker machine likely to dwarf that of his eventual Republican opponent.
“The only thing Obama is dwarfing is his own candor,” adds Baker
