Obama nets campaign record

WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sen. Barack Obama announced Sunday that he raised more than $150 million in September, obliterating previous fundraising records and giving him an enormous tactical advantage over Republican Sen. John McCain in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

With tens of millions more to spend than McCain, Obama has gone on the offensive in dozens of states, including several, such as North Carolina, Virginia and Missouri, once considered long shots. He is running three television ads to every one aired by McCain, and he has built a massive operation to reach voters on Election Day.

The campaign has raised so much money that it is considering passing some along to Democratic Party committees to try to help grow their majorities in Congress, according to a campaign source.

Obama's September fundraising effort well more than doubled the previous monthly record of $67 million that he set in August, and more than tripled the record set during the 2004 race. The Democrat did it largely by continuing to tap the enthusiasm of novice donors contacted through Web ads and e-mail appeals. The campaign said 632,000 people made their first donation to Obama in September, and the average contribution was less than $100.

Overall, 3.1 million donors have contributed to Obama's campaign, which has raised more than $575 million through the primaries and general-election campaign.

Veteran campaign finance experts called the September effort staggering, noting that Obama raised on average more than $200,000 an hour. "He has just completely changed the scale of presidential fund-raising," said Anthony Corrado, who has been writing about presidential fund-raising since the mid-1980s.

Obama's decision to become the first presidential candidate in history not to take public money was considered a gamble, especially because it meant being criticized for breaking a pledge to work within the confines of a public financing system born out of Watergate-era reforms.

The gamble has been paying off for weeks. Instead of having to choose which battleground states to which he will direct resources, as McCain is forced to do, Obama is spending prolifically in all of them.

Instead of reaching out to voters primarily on TV, through the mail, and in automated calls, as McCain is doing, Obama is running ads that are popping up in such unconventional spots as Web sites, infomercials and video games.

Instead of running only negative ads during the campaign's final month, as McCain has done, Obama has run just as many negative spots, but also even more positive ones.

"You see it in the breadth of the ad campaign. You see it in the enormity of the organization. They have not been forced to make resource choices that are typical in a presidential campaign," Corrado said.

Obama's fund-raising effort is one part Howard Dean, who used the reach of the Internet to raise cash. And it's one part Sen. John Kerry, the party's 2004 nominee, who built an impressive structure for tapping support from those who could write checks up to the limit of what election laws allow.

During the primaries, Obama had help from scores of bundlers. But Peter Daou, a strategist for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's primary bid, said it was the sophistication of his online fundraising effort that set Obama apart.

"They've taken things we've all used for a couple years now and turned it into a well-oiled machine," Daou said. "They've been creative and innovative along the way, certainly. But this is not just gimmicks. To me they're like the Michael Jordan of fundraising."

Republican National Committee officials have expressed concerns about the potential for abuse with small-dollar fundraising on this scale. They have noted examples of fake names used to donate through the Internet, and an example of a foreign contribution, which was later returned. The Obama campaign has said it has vetted donations as quickly as possible and would return any questionable contributions.

Back in June, the Center for Responsive Politics and several other campaign finance groups urged both Obama and McCain to publish information about their small donors -- election law does not require campaigns to release information about donors who give less than $200.

Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the center, said the Obama campaign could have avoided questions about its donations had it responded. At the same time, Ritsch said, there is nothing to suggest that fake or foreign donations are a large-scale problem.

"It's very hard to corrupt the system on a large scale," he said.

"The amount of coordination that would be required to corrupt a campaign that's raised more than half a billion dollars is really just impossible."

AP-NY-10-19-08 2014EDT