Show Me The Money

President Obama may be in trouble.

Much has been made of the use of super-PACs in the Republican presidential primary/caucus campaign, in which Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have confederates to attack each other's campaign and evade personal responsibility for the attacks - all made possible by the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. But this is a taste of what Obama can expect in the fall campaign from Republicans. And the President's own campaign may not be as well-equipped to handle it as many believe.

Jim Messina - Obama's campaign manager, not the guy who recorded with Kenny Loggins in the seventies - reports that the Obama campaign raised $42 million for the President and $24 million for the Democratic National Committee - in the last quarter of 2011. But while Messina admits that this is impressive - especially with so much of this $68 million coming from small donors - he says that the campaign has not raised enough to be competitive with the Republicans, who are expected to get a lot of support from super-PACs that are currently raising more money than their Democratic super-PAC counterparts.

The poor economy has also been cited as a possible disincentive to contribute to the Obama campaign. Messina, for his part, notes the oft-reported speculation that Obama is well on the way to raising a billion dollars and so does not need any help.

"Too many Obama supporters," Messina wrote in a fundraising e-mail, "genuinely believe that this campaign doesn't really need their donations, or doesn't need them yet, in order to compete and win. That's wrong. The reason we won in 2008 is that Obama supporters and volunteers viewed their individual role as crucial to the outcome of that election. But there's no secret strategy that we can count on in 2012. This is not a billion-dollar campaign and it's not going to be. We're not taking a dime from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs. All of the money that funds this campaign will come from grassroots supporters like you."

You know, after Citizens United, that may not be the wisest of strategies. And, given all of the liberal interest groups who are ticked off at the President for one reason or another, the poor economy may not be the only reason grassroots donors are happy to let Obama work what he already has in the bank.

In his commentary on PBS last night, David Brooks opined that, with hundreds of millions of dollars floating around, the possibility of Obama having a hundred million dollars less than he had in 2008 won't make a difference - especially with the abundance of free media to consider. Maybe he's right. But historically, the moneyed interests usually get the outcome they want in an election because they have more money to promote their agenda. The moneyed interests tend to support the GOP more generously. And until a constitutional amendment expunging the Citizens United decision is ratified, we can expect money to remain an influence in American politics.