Politico...
Barack
Obama’s 2008 bundlers flee
political ‘machine’
By Ben Smith & Maggie Haberman
7/21/11
When
Senator Barack Obama began
running for president in 2007, a small handful of determined, inspired
supporters found a new political calling. A new group of professionals
- from a
San Juan jewelry story owner to a West Coast biotech executive - raised
hundreds of thousands of dollars each for him and their “bundling” was
crucial
in helping Obama offset Hillary Clinton’s profound financial and
institutional
advantages.
Four
years later, many of those new
bundlers say they won’t be coming back. For reasons ranging from
disillusion
and dissatisfaction to an overriding sense that the once idealistic
Obama
crusade has become yet another soulless political behemoth, that
inspired cadre
of early Obama supporters has largely been replaced by professional
Democratic
Party operatives.
Campaign
officials deny that there’s
any “enthusiasm gap,” and indeed the new operation appears to be on
track to
raise as much money as Obama did in his record-setting 2008 campaign.
But the
identity and mood of the campaign is very different.
The
shift among bundlers is part of a
broader transformation of an insurgent candidate of hope and change to
an
incumbent president grinding out his re-election amid the very real and
often
daunting world of Washington politics. As POLITICO reported recently,
Obama’s
small dollar fundraising effort will rely more on technical muscle and
massive
numbers - and less on raw inspiration - in 2012 than it did in 2008.
Calls to
most of the 105 people who “bundled” more than $200,000 for Obama in
2008 but
didn’t appear on a list of bundlers released last week suggest the same
is true
of some of his more large-sum volunteer fundraisers. While Obama’s
campaign
always depended in part on Chicago institutional money, office-seekers,
and
other traditional fundraising sources, the new campaign will be more
machine
and less dream, more sweat and less inspiration.
“It’s
a political machine now,” said
Pete Garcia, the chief financial officer of a Washington State biotech
company
who fell for Obama early and hard in 2008, and raised more than
$200,0000 in
his first dive into political fundraising.
“I
wasn’t doing it to be an ambassador
or anything like that- I was doing it because I strongly believed in
his
message. I just thought that he would be a little more different than
he is,”
said Garcia, who said he expects to vote for Obama but won’t be
involved in the
campaign.
Obama
has lost another share of top
bundlers for other reasons: they’re ambassadors or other appointees,
with plum
embassies from London to Luxembourg now occupied by top fundraisers.
About half
of the very top tier of bundlers, those who brought in more than
$500,000, were
rewarded with political appointments.
Read
the rest of the story at Politico
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