Apparently, the speculation that President Obama was shooting for an unprecedented $1 billion in fundraising for his 2012 campaign was just bluster--or, as the Obama campaign's head honcho Jim Messina so eloquently puts it, "that's bull****" (in a scripted video? Really?).
Let's just wind that back for a moment--the future President Obama did opt out of the Federal Election Commission's public financing program for presidential primaries and elections in the runup to 2008 because he didn't want to comply with their spending limits, but $3 and $5 donations were hardly the bread and butter of his record-breaking campaign donations. Well-connected fundraisers, bundlers, corporations, and other such ghastly rich people played a hefty role in his election efforts, but it's a nice try by Messina to fit Obama's campaign into the 'when the many little people come together against the few wealthy and powerful, big things can happen'-narrative.
As for the projected possible paths to reelection, HotAir's Ed Morrissey breaks it down:
While you watch the video, though, notice the top scenarios that Messina outlines as their path to 270 electoral votes. They’re basing it on the 2004 election, not Obama’s own win in 2008, which should tell you something about how they see the 2012 environment … since John Kerry lost that race. I’d presume that even though Messina says that they see 40 different paths to 270 from the 2004 baseline that he’s presenting what he sees as their best scenarios. In all of these, Messina assumes that they’ve lost Indiana and that they’ll keep Wisconsin and Michigan, which went all red in 2010. They also assume they’ll carry Iowa and New Hampshire in most of these paths, which doesn’t sound like a good assumption to make at this point. Arizona is a pipe dream; the GOP turns out more heavily than do Democrats in that state. If these are their best arguments to get to 270, at least at the moment, that should be heartening for Republicans.
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