Obama Raises More Than $150 Million in September

[Wretched Excess]

good gravy!  that is a full 40% more than they even dreamed about.  I can't wait to see how much Good Will donated this month.  and
I can't wait to see what his october donors and donations look like when they are reported in mid november . . . after the election is over . . .
when nothing can be done about it.

I am thinking $200 million plus.

Obama Raises More Than $150 Million in September

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announced on Sunday that it had raised more than $150 million in September, a record-shattering amount underscoring again the unprecedented amounts of money he has attracted.

Mr. Obama’s contributions in September more than doubled the $66 million he had collected in August, which had already far exceeded what previous presidential campaigns had raised in a single month.

In a videotaped message included in an e-mail to supporters, David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said that Mr. Obama had added 632,000 new donors in September, bringing the campaign’s total to 3.1 million. The average contribution, Mr. Plouffe said, was $86.

Mr. Plouffe said the money has enabled the campaign to expand to traditional Republican strongholds, noting it had begun to pour resources into West Virginia. He also sought to portray the campaign’s fund-raising success as evidence of Mr. Obama’s grassroots support.

“The two groups that have given us the most contributions are retirees and students, which shows how Barack’s call for change has spanned the generations,” Mr. Plouffe said. “Nurses, teachers, small business owners. It really is the fabric of America that has built this campaign.”

The full details of how the Obama campaign raised its money in September will not be available until Monday, when it files its official report with the Federal Election Commission. But a separate filing by the campaign’s joint fund-raising committee with the Democratic National Committee, the Obama Victory Fund, underscores that Mr. Obama has also been powered by major donors as well.

More

[TheSarge]

Here's how he's doing it:

“On July 11,” reports Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, “the Obama operation created an additional new fund-raising arm that has been fund-raising below the radar, in a drive to collect and funnel money to Democratic parties in 18 key battleground states to register voters and turn out the vote for Barack Obama and down ticket Democratic contests.” Why do they need three committees? Because of federal campaign funding regulation:

The “Committee for Change” just as “Obama for America” and the “Obama Victory Fund”—is part of the effort to elect Obama. By forming a third committee, the Obama campaign can go to donors who have given the maximum under federal contribution limits imposed on the first two committees but have not totally “maxed out.” A similar set-up was in place in 2004 for the Kerry campaign.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/10/obamas_third_fundraising_arm.html

THAT is how Obama is able to raise all of this extra money.

[Wretched Excess]

$150 million bucks in a month.  the mind reels.  he could literally own every television minute in virginia between now and the election.

[Wretched Excess]

from elsewhere:

Moreover, the campaign said that it added 632,000 new donors for a total of 3.1 million contributors to date.

More

 

[TheSarge]

$150 million bucks in a month.  the mind reels.  he could literally own every television minute in virginia between now and the election.

Someone on FR made a comment this morning that Obama has bought up so much air time that even if McCain wanted to purchase any right now he couldn't

[Tess Anderson]

Where is the hell is all this money coming from? Soros and the mid east? Euro-trash?

Even McCain wonders this, openly:

John McCain suggested that his Democratic rival Barack Obama’s record-shattering fundraising haul will lead to scandal in their presidential race and future races, and he hinted that there may already be funny business going on with Obama’s legions of small donors.

Obama announced Sunday morning that he pulled in $150 million in September, which McCain described on “Fox News Sunday” as “completely breaking whatever idea we had after Watergate to keep the cost and spending on campaigns under control. First time, first time since the Watergate scandal. And I can tell you this: that has unleashed now in presidential campaigns a new flood of spending that will then cause a scandal and then we will fix it again. But Sen. Obama has broken it.”

The Republican senator from Arizona was referring both to Obama’s reversal on a pledge to participate a system that gave McCain’s campaign $84 million in taxpayer money but limited his spending to that amount, and also to recent news reports highlighting over-the-limit contributions to Obama given in under-$200 installments from previously undisclosed small donors. Some were fictitious and had listed names such as “Doodad Pro” and “Good Will.”

Federal election rules only require campaigns to report the names, addresses and occupations of donors when they have given more than $200 — and more than $200 million of Obama’s total fundraising haul is from such small contributions.

“We know that when you have unlimited amounts of money — in this case $200 million unreported — and there’s already been stories of people who have made small contributions multiple times and all that. I’m saying it’s laying a predicate for the future that can be very dangerous,” McCain told host Chris Wallace in a live interview from Ohio on Sunday morning, blasting the Illinois senator for not voluntarily disclosing his small donors, as McCain has done.

“There’s $200 million of those campaign contributions — there’s no record. You can report online now. Two hundred million that we don’t know where it came from. Lot of strange things going on in this campaign. The American people should know where every penny came from,” McCain said. “They know where every penny of my campaign contributions came from.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14719.html


I still think he'll lose and lose big. Money can't buy everything.

[Chris_]

$150 million bucks in a month.  the mind reels.  he could literally own every television minute in virginia between now and the election.

Why waste his money?  The MSM is giving it to him for free.

[Chris]

Credit card fraud for Obama

A North Kansas City couple has been left scratching their heads after they became the victims of a political scam.

Steve and Rachel Larman say a strange credit card charge appeared on their statement this month — a $2300 donation to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Larman’s say they don’t want this to be about their political affiliation, but they say they’re not about to give the Obama campaign any help from their pocketbook.

That's how they did it.

[Wretched Excess]

That's how they did it.

I think that is the same couple that we had a thread about last week . . . I don't remember their name exactly, but they sound familiar.

[Wretched Excess]

and by the way, I noticed on the morning joe show this morning that the obama campaign is finally pushing back against all of the mccain campaign attacks concerning obama's hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous money by pointing out the the current campaign finance law is called "mccain-feingold".

so, every time mccain rails about obama buying the airwaves, he is in effect criticizing his own legislation.  poor john mccain.  he has shot himself in the foot so many times, you would think he would run out of bullets sooner or later.  but, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

 

[Wretched Excess]

by comparison, mccain has $47M left.

The funding mismatch between Barack Obama and his opponent for the US presidency, John McCain, was starkly highlighted yesterday when the Republican candidate disclosed he had less than $47m (£27m) available for the final stretch of the campaign to the November 4 election, compared with his rival's hundreds of millions.

McCain, filing his accounts to the government-run electoral spending watchdog, revealed that in September he used $37m of the $84m in public funds he had available for his campaign.

McCain accepted public financing of $84m, which puts a ceiling on any further spending under electoral law. Obama opted against public financing, leaving him free to raise and spend as much as he wants in private donations.

The news came a day after Obama disclosed that he had raised a staggering $150m in September.

Republican strategists admitted that the mismatch will mean that McCain's options are much narrower than Obama's and he will have to target the money more carefully on key states.