Obama's A List

Sweet column: Obama's donor courtship

While Chicago was, naturally, fertile fund-raising turf for Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama, his top state for first quarter cash was California, and his donor list is sprinkled with big names from the entertainment industry.

Besides stars who wrote checks to Obama, the Illinois senator also heav-ily relied on a relatively small group of big donors to help him raise $25.8 million in just three months, according to Federal Election Commission reports filed Sunday.

• From the entertainment world, here's a sampling of Obama's big names: actors Eddie Murphy, Barbra Steisand, Tom Hanks, Angela Bassett, Zach Braff, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Stiller; producer/director James Brooks; music producer Steve McKeever (a graduate of St. Ignatius High School); musician Branford Marsalis, and songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. And, as much reported, the Dreamwork moguls David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who hosted a Beverly Hills bash for Obama in February.

Obama also received donations from at least eight executives from Island Def Jam executives, whose artists include the rapper Ludacris, whose song lyrics have been criticized for promoting sex, drugs and violence. Ludacris, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, appeared with Obama at a rally in Atlanta last month. The rapper met with Obama in Chicago last November to talk about AIDS awareness.

I am mentioning this because, in the wake of the Don Imus controversy in which the shock jock smeared the Rutgers basketball team with racial and sexual slurs, Obama in South Carolina last Friday said at a rally, in response to a question, that some rappers are "degrading their sisters. That doesn't inspire me."

To note: Big names don't equal mega-donations. Federal rules limit an individual donation to a maximum of $2,300 per election. A person can donate $2,300 for the presidential primary and $2,300 for the general election -- money that can be used only if the candidate becomes the nominee. Most of the celebs in the list above gave at least $2,300.

• ZIP codes in Chicago accounted for $3,654,265 of Obama's total, with his hometown his best city. His top Chicago ZIP codes are 60614 and 60611, which includes wealthy neighborhoods in the city and downtown; many givers list their business address for federal records and not where they live. Of Obama's top five ZIP codes, four were from Chicago and the fifth was from Manhattan, 10021.

• Obama is making an enormous effort to stroke big donors who can use their influential networks to "bundle" checks for him. According to an analysis by the Campaign Finance Institute of Obama's $25.8 million, 46 percent of it was raised by donors who gave at least $2,300. Some 68 percent of Obama's total was raised by people who gave at least $1,000.

How did Obama do so well in New York? For starters, he has a full-time professional fund-raiser, Jenny Yeager, who raised money for his Senate war chests, based in New York.

Exactly how the deal is done is well-explained in the current issue of New York Magazine, where Obama is featured on the cover. Writer John Heilemann provides a detailed look at how ardently Obama wooed Manhattan donors, including the "courtship" of investment banker and top-tier donor, Robert Wolf, who he first met last December. Then Obama called him to chat and "the next week, they had dinner in Washington, just the two of them," Heilemann wrote.

Get Barack Obama's Speeches for Free

LOS ANGELES, April 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Publishing 180 announced that it is offering a free e-book edition of their just released softbound book, the "Best Speeches of Barack Obama."

The free e-book includes all 500-plus pages from the just released $29.99 print edition. No email address or registration is required for the download. It is available at http://www.freeobamabook.com/.

The book, the "Best Speeches of Barack Obama," groups 77 of Barack Obama's most notable speeches into 16 categories including Iraq, education, healthcare, the environment, foreign policy & defense and his plans for the economy.

In addition to the speeches, the book contains Obama's floor statements and podcasts, including transcripts of the podcasts he called in from his cell phone while visiting the Middle East and Iraq.

About the free e-book offer, Publishing 180's president, Jaclyn Easton, explains, "To most people it doesn't make sense to give away a version of something you're selling, but in this case we believe it's the best way to boost sales."

Easton explains that since the paper edition is sold only online, people don't have the benefit of being able to look at it thoroughly in a bookstore. By offering a free e-book version that is identical to the bound book, people can look at it page-by-page and have that experience. "It's 522 pages. If the insides appeal to them they are going to want the print edition in addition to the e-book," says Easton.

But there's more to the free e-book than bumping sales. "This is a great tool for educators because these speeches are part of America's history," says Easton. "We encourage teachers, professors and other educators to download the book and share it with their students."

Easton also notes a benefit for business professionals: "We believe that by studying Obama's speeches, executives can learn why and how he's such an effective communicator and leader, and, in turn, become one, too."

To soften the cost of distributing the 500-plus-page free e-book, ObamaQuotes.com is sponsoring the download in exchange for a handful of ads.

The free e-book offer is guaranteed through June 30, 2007 at http://www.freeobamabook.com/. No email address or registration required. It is an instant download with one click.

The $29.99 softcover edition is available at http://www.obamaspeechbook.com/.

Newsweek: Is the Clinton Juggernaut Sending Supporters in Obama's Arms?

The End of Inevitability

By Richard Wolffe

Newsweek

April 16, 2007 issue - There's a turncoat inside Hillary Clinton's money machine. Over the past several years, Leonore Blitz has helped raise about $250,000 for Clinton's Senate races, and she signed up early to help the new presidential campaign. But in recent weeks the Manhattan marketing consultant has secretly attended finance meetings and fund-raisers for Clinton's archrival, Barack Obama. Under intense pressure from the Clinton team to pick sides, Blitz—who bundled more than $1 million for John Kerry in 2004—felt deeply conflicted. Clinton operatives have warned donors not to contribute to other campaigns, and put a price on disloyalty: early supporters will be valued and latecomers scorned. But now Blitz is coming out of the shadows, ready to test the rules. "I have been a lifelong advocate of women and minorities' participating and running for political office," she told NEWSWEEK last week. "Therefore, I'm supporting both Clinton and Obama."

Continued

International Herald Tribune: Obama Gains Admirers

Barack Obama, Low Key, Gains Admirers

COLO, Iowa: Senator Barack Obama is not big on what he calls red-meat applause lines when he campaigns in small communities like this one, just northeast of Des Moines. He does not tell many jokes. He talks in even, measured tones, and at times is so low-key that he lulls his audiences into long, if respectful, silences.

Obama likes to recount the chapters of his unusual life: growing up in Hawaii, living overseas, community organizing in Chicago, working in the Illinois Legislature, though not his years as a U.S. senator.

He talks - often in broad, general strokes - about an Obama White House that would provide health care to all, attack global warming, improve education, fix Social Security and end the war in Iraq.

His campaign events end almost as an afterthought, surprising voters used to the big finishes typically served up by the presidential candidates seeking their support. "Thank you very much, everybody; have a nice day," Obama said pleasantly in Dakota City, Iowa, one afternoon, with a leisurely wave of a hand. He headed over to a table where copies of his books, brought by audience members, had been neatly laid out, awaiting the slash of his left-handed autograph.

For most Democrats, Obama is the Illinois senator who riveted the 2004 Democratic National Convention with a keynote speech that marked him as one of the most powerful speakers his party had produced in 50 years

But as Obama methodically worked his way across swaths of rural northern Iowa - his towering figure and skin color making him stand out at diners and veterans' homes, at high schools and community colleges - it was clear that he is not presenting himself, stylistically at least, the way he did in July 2004 when he gripped Democrats at the Fleet Center in Boston.

He is cerebral and easygoing, often talking over any applause that might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to present a political style that contrasts with the more-charged presence of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

He rarely mentions President George W. Bush, as he disparages the partisan quarrels of Washington, and is, at most, elliptically critical of Edwards and Clinton when he notes that he had opposed the war in Iraq from the start; the two others voted to authorize the war in 2002.

His audiences are rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd. Yet Iowa is not the Fleet Center, and this appeal - "letting people see how I think," as Obama put it in an interview - could clearly go a long way in drawing the support of Iowans who are turning out in huge numbers to see him in the state where the presidential voting process will start.

"He's low-key; he speaks like a professor," said Jim Sayer, 51, a farmer from Humboldt. "Maybe I expected more emotion. But the lower key impresses me: He seems to be at the level that we are."

Mary Margaret Gran, a middle-school teacher who met him when he spoke to 25 Iowans eating breakfast at a tiny diner in Colo on Friday morning, summed up her view the moment Obama had moved on to the next table.

"Rock star?" Gran said, offering the description herself. "That's the national moniker. But dazzle is not what he is about at all. He's peaceful."

Obama, wearing sunglasses as he sat in the back of a car that was taking him to a charter plane and then on to his home in Chicago for the Easter weekend, nodded when told what Sayer and Gran had said about him.

"I use a different style if I'm speaking to a big crowd; I can gin up folks pretty well," he said. "But when I'm in these town hall settings, my job is not to throw them a lot of red meat. I want to give them a sense of my thought process."

If Obama enters the room to the sounds of "Think" by Aretha Franklin and the roar of people coming to their feet, clapping and jostling for photographs, it is only moments before the atmosphere turns from campaign rally to college seminar, when he talks, for example, about the need for a "common sense, nonideological, practical-minded, generous agenda for change in this country."

This evolution, or more precisely this attention to Obama's credentials as a campaigner in communities like this, comes in a week in which he has, with the report that he had nearly matched Clinton by raising $25 million in the first quarter of presidential fund-raising, left no doubt that he had the resources, and presumably the popular support, to potentially deny her the nomination.

Continued

Sioux City Journal: Barack Obama Will Announce Housing Program for Veterans

Obama's Housing Plan for Veterans

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Friday said he would unveil a housing program for veterans aimed at keeping them off the streets when their service is completed.

The Illinois senator told The Associated Press he would introduce legislation Monday that he calls Homes for Heroes. The plan would establish grant and voucher programs to encourage development of affordable housing targeted for veterans.

"Veterans are far more likely to be homeless than non-veterans and part of it is because we're not providing services to them as they transition out of the service," Obama said in an interview before a campaign rally. "Part of it is because there is just not enough affordable housing."

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates as many as 200,000 are living on the streets or in shelters and perhaps twice as many are homeless at some in the course of a year.

Obama, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, concluded a three-day trip to Iowa by touring the Iowa Veterans Home and focusing on veterans issues.

He has walked a fine line on the issue, mixing his opposition to the war in Iraq with support for the troops.

"During the course of this war, one of the things I think we did learn from Vietnam was that whether you are for or against a war, everyone has to honor and respect the service and sacrifice of the troops," Obama said.

Obama said the government spends billions to prosecute the war but has consistently shortchanged programs for veterans, who should be a top priority.

"We haven't always done that in our federal budget," said Obama. "During the course of this war the VA has consistently low-balled their requests for funding."

In addition to problems like substance abuse, Obama said the lack of affordable housing has been a consistent problem for veterans. He said his legislation would address that shortfall.

"What we've done is we've increased voucher programs, we're encouraging grants and loans for non-profits to build affordable housing for veterans," said Obama.

Obama said he chose to visit the Iowa Veterans Home because of its solid reputation. The center is essentially a state-financed retirement home for veterans.

"The fact that you have an outstanding veterans home that's state run here, I think that has to be the model for how the federal VA system is run, as well as how states around the country ought to be operating," said Obama. "We wanted to highlight what a good-quality veterans home looks like to make sure that's the standard by which the VA system is operated."

In his three days in Iowa, Obama has often focused on veterans. At each of his stops he's held meetings -- usually in private -- with small groups of veterans, and he packed more than 250 people into a VFW Hall in tiny Dakota City on Thursday.

"It's to say thank you for their service," Obama said. "I reminded them that my grandfather served in World War II."

Speaking at a noisy campaign rally at a community college, Obama said his latest trip to Iowa demonstrates his grassroots campaign plan.

"This is my 20th county I have visited in Iowa since I announced," said Obama. "At this pace, by the end of the year I will have gotten to every county."

Obama said his status coming from neighboring Illinois gives him an edge in Iowa, where precinct caucuses launch the presidential nominating process.

"I feel like I'm home," said Obama. "Illinois is basically Iowa and then we have Chicago."

Barack Obama Raked in $25 million, Stays Competitive with Hillary Clinton

DAVENPORT, Iowa - Democrat Barack Obama raked in $25 million for his presidential bid in the first three months of 2007, placing him on a par with front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and dashing her image as the party's inevitable nominee.

The donations came from an eye-popping 100,000 donors, the campaign said in a statement Wednesday.

The figures were the latest evidence that Obama, a political newcomer who has served just two years in the Senate, has emerged as the most powerful new force in presidential politics this year.

It also reinforced his status as a significant threat to Clinton, who'd hoped her own $26 million first quarter fundraising total would begin to squeeze her rivals out of contention.

The campaign reported that the figure included at least $23.5 million that he can spend on the highly competitive primary race. The Clinton campaign has yet to disclose how much they can use for the primary verses money that is designated for the general election.

While Clinton has honed a vast national fundraising network through two Senate campaigns and her husband's eight years as president, Obama launched his bid for the White House with a relatively small donor base concentrated largely in Illinois, his home state. But his early opposition to the Iraq war and voter excitement over his quest to be the first black president quickly fueled a powerful fundraising machine.

Since he formally declared his presidential campaign in February, Obama has been traveling the country with a focus on urban areas where he could build his momentum and bring in new donors. He attracted big-money Hollywood and Wall St. executives along with families who came out to his stops in places like Oklahoma that sometimes are neglected by other candidates.

More than half the donors contributed via the Internet for a total of $6.9 million, the campaign said.

"This overwhelming response, in only a few short weeks, shows the hunger for a different kind of politics in this country and a belief at the grassroots level that Barack Obama can bring out the best in America to solve our problems," said Obama finance chairwoman Penny Pritzker.

Donors are limited by law to contributions of $2,300 for the primary election, but Clinton, Obama and some other candidates also have been raising money for the general election. That allows them to take another $2,300 from each donor, but the money has to be returned if they don't win the nomination.

Clinton's campaign often solicited the $4,600 donations, while Obama's campaign focused on recruiting small dollar donors. In the coming months, he can return to those donors and ask those who haven't maxed out to give more.

Unlike Clinton, Obama says he doesn't take money from the lobbyists or political action committees that are frequent contributors on other campaigns.

Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle said, "We are thrilled with our historic fundraising success and congratulate Senator Obama and the entire Democratic field on their fundraising, which demonstrates the overwhelming desire for change in our country."

Obama was visiting Iowa Wednesday, holding an evening rally at a community college in Mason City.

Among the other Democratic candidates, aides to former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his $14 million in new contributions included $1 million for the general election.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said he had raised $6 million and had more than $5 million cash on hand.

Aides to Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd said he raised more than $4 million and transferred nearly $5 million from his Senate campaign, for a total of $9 million in receipts and $7.5 million cash on hand. Delaware Sen. Joe Biden lagged behind, with his staff reporting that he had total receipts of nearly $4 million, nearly half of which was transferred from his Senate campaign account.

Edwards, speaking to Davenport, Iowa, television station KWQC, complained that the pressure to raise huge sums was distorting the political process.

"We should actually be publicly financing these campaigns," Edwards said. "We shouldn't be doing these money contests. They're not healthy, they're not good for democracy. Public financing is the answer.

"While we still have this system, you have to compete the best way you can. What's clear is I think we're going to have at least three candidates on the Democratic side who have plenty of money to run a very serious campaign."

Among the Republican candidates, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was the top money-raiser with $23 million, another eye-catching sum that place him in the same league with Clinton and Obama and left his GOP rivals in the dust.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani raised $15 million for the quarter, while Arizona Sen. John McCain posted $12.5 million. Giuliani leads the GOP field in national popularity polls, followed by McCain.

Barack Obama Fundraiding

New York Times: Obama Built Donor Newtork from Roots Up

CHICAGO — When Barack Obama announced to friends over brunch in 2002 that he planned to run for the United States Senate, one of their first questions was how he could possibly raise the necessary millions.

After all, two and a half years after he had taken quite a “spanking,” as he put it, in his bid to unseat an incumbent congressman, he was still struggling to pay off a $20,000 debt, eking out donations of $1,000 here, $2,000 there.

Improbably, Mr. Obama, running as something of an outsider, wound up raising $15 million and winning that 2004 Senate race. Now that he is running for president, his fund-raising prowess has helped make him the chief rival to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

[Aides said Monday that he had collected more than $20 million in donations in the first three months of the campaign, enough to ratchet up the anxiety in the Clinton camp, which announced it had raised $26 million. Mr. Obama’s campaign has yet to release precise information on its total donations or contributors.]

A look at his 2004 Senate race shows how he laid the foundation for his current fund-raising drive. Even as he cultivated an image as an unconventional candidate devoted to the people, not the establishment, he systematically built a sophisticated, and in many ways quite conventional, money machine.

Interviews and campaign finance reports show Mr. Obama drew crucial early support from Chicago’s thriving black professional class, using it as a springboard to other rainmakers within the broader party establishment. Soon he was drawing money — and, just as valuable, buzz — among wealthy Chicago families like the Crowns and the Pritzkers, as well as friends from Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago, where Mr. Obama taught constitutional law and his wife worked in community relations. As his popularity surged after his rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004, big fund-raisers on Wall Street and in Hollywood hopped aboard, and grass-roots contributions began pouring in as well.

Mr. Obama has written that at the beginning he felt uncomfortable asking for money, but he developed a skill at cultivating donors, often with the same disarming directness he uses on the campaign trail.

“I met him on the first hole,” Steven S. Rogers, a former business owner who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, recalled recently about a golf game in 2001. “By the sixth hole, he said, ‘Steve, I want to run for the Senate.’ And by the ninth hole, he said he needed help to clear up some debts.”

Mr. Obama’s breakthrough in the 2004 Senate race was also made possible by a new wrinkle in the election laws. Faced with a self-financed opponent in the Democratic primary, Blair Hull, who pumped more than $28 million of his own money into the race, Mr. Obama was able to accept up to $12,000 from each donor, or six times the limit at that time.

As a result, nearly half of the more than $5 million that Mr. Obama raised in the primary came from just 300 donors. In a stroke of luck, he had just enough money to pay for a television advertising blitz in the final weeks as Mr. Hull’s campaign crumbled amid accusations that he had abused a former wife.

Some longtime Obama donors said they were glad to be able to exploit the financing loophole to help him.

James S. Crown, a senior member of the Crown family, said that despite the “formidable competition” in the Senate primary, he was so impressed after meeting Mr. Obama for breakfast in early 2003 that he quickly lent his support.

“I was just taken with his sensibility, his intelligence, his values and how he conducted himself during that campaign,” said Mr. Crown, who is Mr. Obama’s chief presidential fund-raiser in Illinois.

Mr. Obama appears to have such a firm hold on so many of Chicago’s big donors that Mrs. Clinton, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, did not even have a fund-raiser here during the crucial first quarter of this year. At the same time, Mr. Obama’s campaign says its grass-roots support is expanding rapidly, in part through $25-a-ticket fund-raisers designed for a new generation of donors.

Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. But in his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he sounded prescient about the dangers of the money chase, noting that he could not assume it “didn’t alter me in some ways.” At the simplest level, he wrote, it “eliminated any sense of shame” about asking for donations.

But, he added, he also worries that spending so much time courting wealthy donors has caused him to spend “more and more time above the fray,” away from the concerns of ordinary voters.

Mr. Obama, who grew up mostly in Hawaii, began making political contacts in Chicago as a community organizer in the 1980s. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he returned to Chicago and led a drive that registered more than 100,000 voters for the 1992 elections.