Barack Obama Has a Fund-Raising Dilemma

Obama also received significant help from Washington insiders. He was chosen to give his noteworthy speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention because of the importance of his Senate seat to change the balance toward a more Democratic Senate. More importantly, he raised significant funds from Washington insiders, including, ironically, some help from Hillary Clinton , who attended a fund-raiser during that campaign.

I discussed Obama's Senate campaign with Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics (the center has a great Web site www.opensecrets.org). Ritsch pointed out that Obama has taken about 8% of his funds from political action committees (PACs) as opposed to about 4% for Clinton, and lobbyists were the 17th-largest industry to donate to Obama's Senate campaign (about 18th-largest for Clinton).

To his credit, Obama accomplished difficult work on an ethics bill when he arrived in Washington -- an unusual achievement for a junior senator. But he also followed the lead of many others. He opened his own PAC -- the Hopefund. The Hill reported that he has used this fund to sprinkle campaign donations to the tune of $5,000 on politicians in early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

Yet Obama has made a big deal out of not taking money from PACs and lobbyists in his presidential campaign -- a departure from his Senate campaigns. But it's not as if he isn't taken money from Washington insiders and large corporations.

In reality, he is taking their money. The money doesn't come from registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., but it does come from registered state lobbyists and bundlers. Senator Obama had 255 bundlers listed on his Web site as of July 2007. (Sen. Clinton had 213 Hillraisers for the same period, according to her campaign spokesperson, Phil Singer.)

Are bundlers really any different from lobbyists? I posed this question to Bill Hogan, a researcher at the Center for Public Integrity. The Center will release a fourth installment of a book in the summer of 2008 called Buying of the President: 2008. Mr. Hogan commented that "it's really more about access. You want to ask who are the people with proximity to politicians and that would be registered lobbyists and bundlers."