Campaign Fund-raising, Barack Obama Re-election | featured news

A little political trivia: President Obama says the photo of him on a political poster with the word HOPE comes from an event in which he is sitting next to George Clooney. "We struck up a friendship," Obama told Hollywood donors gathered at Clooney's house last night. "And this is the first time that George Clooney has ever been photo-shopped out of a picture.

President Obama is struggling to draw in big-dollar donations, with half as many people writing large checks to his campaign than at this point four years ago.

President Obama's re-election team is using bad polls to try to raise campaign cash. In a fundraising e-mail sent out last night, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina writes: "If the general election were held today, President Obama would lose to Mitt Romney -- according to the latest poll from Washington Post-ABC News."

President Obama's re-election campaign raised $29.1 million in January in conjunction with the campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the campaign announced Friday.

President Barack Obama's campaign set a goal of raising $60 million in the fourth quarter of the year to benefit the Democratic incumbent's re-election and the Democratic National Committee, a campaign official said on Saturday.

He shouldn't have to concede any states for lack of money – and he already has raised more than his Republican rivals combined. His approval ratings are down and the economic recovery is sputtering. But President Obama brings to the 2012 campaign one strategic advantage that previous Democratic presidential candidates would have envied: the money to compete everywhere.