Senator Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday of his record-shattering $150 million fund-raising total for September underscored just how much his campaign has upended standards for raising money in presidential campaigns.This Black man's campaign has now raised more than $600 million, almost equaling what all the candidates from both major parties collected in private donations in 2004.
It is a remarkable ascent to previously unimagined financial heights — Mr. Obama’s September total more than doubled the record $66 million he collected in August — that has been cheered by some and decried by others concerned about the influence of money in politics. The impact on the way presidential campaigns are financed is likely to be profound, potentially providing an epitaph on the tombstone of the existing public finance system.
Campaign finance watchdog groups said Sunday that Mr. Obama’s September haul bolstered their arguments for the need to revamp the presidential public financing system to restore its relevancy. It is an effort that both Senator John McCain and Mr. Obama have supported but that has faltered in Congress recently.
Democrats, though, may be reluctant to surrender the significant money-raising advantage they have developed over Republicans, saying that Mr. Obama, by cultivating millions of small donors over the Internet, has built what amounts to a parallel public financing system that is arguably more democratic.
“I think there’s going to be a fight inside the Democratic Party on this,” said David Donnelly, a director of Campaign Money Watch, a watchdog group.
In this election cycle, all of the major presidential candidates, except for former Senator John Edwards, opted out of the public financing system for the primary. Mr. Obama became the first major party candidate to bypass the public money for the general election since the system began in the 1970s, backing away from an earlier pledge to accept it if his opponent did as well. It was a move the McCain campaign and campaign finance watchdog groups harshly criticized.
But any effort to fix the system would be complicated by loopholes that permit wealthy individuals and moneyed interests to exert outsize influence, including through 527 groups, which can accept unlimited contributions.
“If you locked me up in a room and said, ‘You fix it,’ I’m not sure there is a way,” said Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004 and a senior adviser for Mr. Edwards in the Democratic primary last year.
Tad Devine, a former senior strategist for Senator John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, said there were plenty of arguments that what Mr. Obama had done was healthy for the democratic process.
“What we’re going to have to figure out,” Mr. Devine said, “is why this is not only good for the Democratic Party but it’s good for the country.”
An examination of Mr. Obama’s intake in September lends credence to arguments by both sides. David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said in a video message sent to supporters that Mr. Obama had 632,000 new donors in September, bringing the campaign’s total to 3.1 million. The average contribution, Mr. Plouffe said, was less than $100.
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 Obama Victory Fund, which is the campaign’s joint fund-raising operation with the Democratic National Committee, underscores that Mr. Obama has also been powered by major donors, many of them with interests in Washington, as well.
Mr. Obama’s joint money-raising committee, which can take in checks of more than $30,000 that are divided between the campaign and the D.N.C., collected $69 million in September. The fund funneled $32 million in September to the Obama campaign’s coffers and $26.5 million to the national committee.
The D.N.C., which can spend money on Mr. Obama’s behalf with certain restrictions, announced Sunday it collected nearly $50 million in September and had $27.4 million in cash on hand at the end of the month.
Coupled with his appeals to small donors over the Internet, Mr. Obama has maintained an aggressive, high-dollar fund-raising schedule. More than 600 people wrote checks of $25,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund in September. They included Dwight Howard, the Orlando Magic basketball star; Andrea Jung, the chief executive of Avon; Gregory Brown, president of Motorola; and Charles E. Phillips Jr., president of Oracle.
McCain finance officials and other campaign finance experts initially anticipated that the Republican National Committee’s stockpile of cash and strong fund-raising, along with the $84 million Mr. McCain received in public financing, might be enough to stay within range of the Obama financial juggernaut.
The R.N.C. announced this month that it raised $66 million in September, which exceeded fund-raisers’ expectations, and officials said it had finished the month with about $77 million in the bank. But the Obama campaign has been outspending the McCain campaign on television by three-and-a-half-to-one, even with spending by the R.N.C. factored in, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which analyzes advertising spending. Source