Makeshift Office at Heart of Obama Fund-Raising
______________________________________________________________
By MICHAEL LUO
The New York Times
February 19, 2008
CHICAGO — A cluster of cramped cubicles, tucked away in a rear corner of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters here, comprises the heart of a fund-raising machine that has reshaped the calculus of the 2008 election.
Mr. Obama’s finance director, Julianna Smoot, who has helped him raise more than $150 million so far, does not even have her own office. A ping-pong table is the gathering spot for Friday lunches for her team.
The setting, which has the feel of an Internet start-up, is emblematic of how Mr. Obama has been able to raise heaps of cash. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign will report to the Federal Election Commission that it collected $36 million in January — $4 million more than campaign officials had previously estimated — an unprecedented feat for a single month in American politics that was powered overwhelmingly by small online donations. That dwarfed the $13.5 million in January that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to report Wednesday and the $12 million Senator John McCain’s campaign said he brought in for the month.
Mr. Obama’s startling success, however, has also now put him on the spot, tempting him to back away from indications he gave last year that he would agree to use public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did the same. The hesitation has given Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee whose advisers concede he would likely fall far short of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising for the general election, fodder for a series of attacks.
“This type of back-peddling and waffling isn’t what inspired millions of people to invest in Senator Obama’s candidacy,” said Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain.
Under rules of public financing, a candidate has access to $85 million from a taxpayer-financed fund for the general election, a substantial amount to spend for the roughly two months after this year’s conventions. But this election cycle has shattered fund-raising and spending records and upended expectations.
The details of Mr. Obama’s January fund-raising illustrate just how much his campaign has been able to chart a new path for the presidential race. He brought in $28 million online, with 90 percent of those transactions coming from people who donated $100 or less and 40 percent from donors who gave $25 or less, suggesting that these contributors could be tapped for more (donors are limited to giving $2,300 per candidate during the primary season.) More than 200,000 of the campaign’s nearly 300,000 donors in January were first-time givers to Mr. Obama.The campaign’s success over the Internet has freed Mr. Obama from having to take valuable time off the trail for fund-raising events for major donors — just $4 million in January came from traditional fund-raisers.
“We know we don’t have to get him in front of as many major donors now,” said Ms. Smoot.
Mr. Obama has done just a handful of traditional fund-raisers since the beginning of the year and none at all in February, a sharp contrast to the Clinton campaign, which has been keeping up a steady diet of fund-raisers with either Mrs. Clinton or her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton’s operation has also been pushing to improve it efforts online, with her campaign saying Tuesday that it had brought in $15 million over the Internet in February, with donations jumping after news came out that she had lent $5 million to her campaign.
Mr. Obama’s January surge shocked even members of his finance team. When Meaghan Burdick, who works closely on Mr. Obama’s online fund-raising efforts with Joe Rospers, the campaign’s director of new media, drew up a set of projections in December, she came up with three different scenarios for January in the event Mr. Obama won Iowa, finished second or finished third, with a victory expected to draw in $10 to $15 million over the Internet.
At the heart of the Obama campaign’s online effort is a giant e-mail list, which now numbers in the millions but started out as just a list of fewer than 50,000 culled mostly from Mr. Obama’s run for the United States Senate. That list grew as Mr. Obama’s many rallies drew thousands of people, where attendees gave their e-mail addresses to the campaign, as well as other initiatives to draw more people into the campaign’s orbit.
But tapping small-money donors can be a tricky balancing act. Campaign officials believe that they have gotten better in calibrating making sales pitches for cash while also trying to encourage people to participate in other ways. As a result, a recent e-mail asked supporters to write letters to superdelegates making their case for Mr. Obama.
The campaign’s online donors have also come to form the backbone of its vaunted grass-roots operation across the country, with information about new donors quickly transmitted to organizers on the ground to enlist them for phone banking and other volunteer efforts.
“We want to make sure that the experience people have with us is not solely around money,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager.
After Mr. Obama’s victory in Iowa, the campaign collected $2.8 million online. But it was the two days following Mr. Obama’s stunning loss to Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire that campaign officials point to as when they began to realize they were in for an extraordinary month.
On the evening of the primary, Mr. Obama’s finance staff settled in watch the results from their cubicles. When the television networks called the race for Mrs. Clinton, their spirits sagged. But Ms. Burdick was staring at her laptop, watching a graph showing how much money was coming into the campaign from donations over the Internet. Within minutes, it was shooting upward.
“This is crazy,” said Ms. Burdick, calling over to two of her colleagues sitting near her.
Within three hours the campaign had cleared $500,000. In the morning, when Ms. Burdick woke up and checked her laptop again, the campaign had raised $750,000. Over the course of two days, Mr. Obama collected $4.4 million online.
The campaign sent out an e-mail the morning after the New Hampshire defeat from Mr. Obama to donors.
“I know you just made a donation, but we are about to enter the most decisive period of the campaign,” he said, signing his name at the end, “Thank you, Barack.”
In Birmingham, Ala., Matthew Lane, 38, logged into his e-mail on his laptop. Although he earns less than $20,000 a year as a storyteller in public libraries and doing some freelancing writing, he decided to give another $25 on top of a few small contributions he had made dating back to March 2007.
“The campaign has been so incredibly grass-roots, it does sort of feel like you are making a difference,” he said, “even in giving in small increments like that.”
And earlier this month, after Super Tuesday, Mr. Lane decided to tack on another $25 donation. |
