So Much For Those "Small Donors"

Obama is amassing quite a financial war chest. It was reported recently that the Obama campaign has raised  86 million dollars in the second quarter of the year!

Wow! 86 million dollars!

Obama and his campaign love to claim that "average" folk are what keeps his campaign coffers stuffed to the breaking point with their so-called "small" contributions.The Obama campaign claimed the same back in 2008. "The people" gave all they could and that was the source of all that cash Obama raised...or was it?

Seems Obama and his campaign are trying to get you to believe that instead of the vast majority of these funds coming from Billionaire/Millionaire/Corporate/Wall Street/ Over Seas shady donors, that they are actually coming from Mom and Pop, Elderly, teens, young folk, starving poor and quickly starving middle class folk that just love them some Obama. Love him enough to send, on average...$69.00!!

Bullshit!

And now, at lest, two reporters are questioning that story...

Personal Democracy Forum:

 Obama Raises a Whopping $86M, But Not As Grassroots as They Want You To Think

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has announced that Obama 2012 has raised a whopping $86 million in the second quarter of this year, shattering George W. Bush's prior record of $50 million in a quarter, and way ahead of Obama's fundraising pace four years ago. The official report will be filed with the FEC this Friday, but Messina continued the campaign's tradition of reporting "first" to its grassroots email list via YouTube video. The numbers are impressive, but there's a catch.
Messina emphasizes the grass-roots base of Obama 2012 in the video, rattling off statistic after statistic: 31,000 face-to-face meetings conducted by organizers; 290,000 conversations; 650 local organizing meetings; 60 field offices set up across the country. These are impressive numbers, and further indication of how the Obama team tracks field data.
But when it comes to the hard numbers of campaign finance, Messina tries to pull a fast one on his supposedly grassroots audience when it comes to describing, as he puts it, "who we raised it from." He proudly touts the campaign's 552,462 individual donors who gave more than 680,000 contributions in the second quarter. If you had any doubt that we are living in an age of mass participation in national politics, enabled by the internet's ease of communication, here's more proof. Ninety-eight percent of all those contributions, he notes, were in amounts of $250 or less, with an average donation size of just $69, proof of Obama's roots "small dollar, ordinary people" kind of politics.
There's just one problem with this claim: The $86 million raised by the Obama campaign in this quarter didn't come with an average donation size of $69. That's because, as Messina notes near the video's end, $38 million of that whopping total went to the Democratic National Committee, via the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that Obama controls. At OVF fundraisers, a donor can give up to $5,000 to the presidential campaign committee and another $30,800 to the DNC. (Here's an invitation to one that happened recently in Chicago, starring Rahm Emanuel.)
"We can bet," says Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute, which is working on analyzing the details buried in the campaign's forthcoming 15,000 page report to the FEC, "that most of the party money came from people who maxed out. " He added in an email to me, "Interestingly, by going to people for 30K this calendar year, he can go back again next year for another 30K. It's one of the perqs of incumbency." An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of DNC fundraising between January and May 2011 found that the committee raised $11 million from donors contributing more than $30,000 compared with just $3 million raised in that category by the Republican National Committee. Big checks of $10,000 and up were 38% of that haul, compared to just 18% in that category for Republicans.
Multiply 680,000 by $69 and you get about $46.9 million. Messina's appears to want things both ways--a record-breaking money haul AND the appearance of being a campaign "owned" by ordinary people. That may be the case to the extent that you think maxing-out donors from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood are "ordinary people."

And then there's this from The Washington Examiner.com

"We did this from the bottom up," Barack Obama's campaign manager, Jim Messina, said in a new video touting the President's fundraising success. Messina and other Democrats are peddling the line that Obama's massive $86 million haul last quarter resulted from mobs of regular Americans cutting small checks. In truth, Obama's campaign is like every other presidential campaign -- mostly funded by wealthy individuals and special interests, many of whom profit from the president's policies.

*snip*

Of the $31.1 million the DNC has raised in contributions this year, almost two-thirds -- $19.3 million -- has come from individuals giving $10,000 or more, according to my analysis of FEC data. So, judging by all available data, rich people cutting big checks are providing an overwhelming majority of Obama's re-election money.
Obama's reliance on rich donors cutting five-figure checks isn't unusual or surprising, but it does clash with the image his campaign puts forward. Messina's web videos, like most of Obama's fundraising emails, push the myth that the campaign is mostly funded by ordinary people cutting $50 checks. It may be true that 98 percent of donations to the Obama campaign were $250 or less, but that's not a very telling statistic.
First, a donor could cut 20 $250 checks to contribute the $5,000 maximum to the campaign. More importantly, Messina never broke down that 98 percent and 2 percent by dollar amount. Maybe half of the campaign's money came from that "richest 2 percent," to adapt an Obama phrase.
Also, Messina was only parsing contributions to Obama for America (where donors are limited to $2,500 for the primary, and $2,500 for the general), and not the contributions to the DNC (where donors can give $30,800 per year), thus skewing the data toward smaller contributions.
This small-dollar donor myth is part of Obama's effort to portray himself as the scourge of special interests. Obama proxies on Wednesday were casting his $86 million haul in the context of "secret" money promised by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. The narrative is clear: Obama is the man of the people, while Republicans are the party of Big Business. That's half-right.

Here's something that is sure to make you split a rib laughing:

"We didn't accept one single dollar from Washington lobbyists," Messina also bragged.

 * Bold emphasis mine* 

Don't hold your breath waiting to see Obama or his Campaign flunkies questioned on this by the "lame Stream media."

Oh well..............................So much for Grandma's "small donation!"