Money Can’t Buy You Love, But Can It Buy President Obama (Or The Kochs) An Election?

President Obama speaks at a fundraising event (New York Magazine)

Barack Obama and his army of wealthy “bundlers” are getting a head start on the purchase of the 2012 presidential election, but conservative financiers looking to beat him next fall aren’t far behind.

President Obama’s reelection campaign kicked off in earnest over the last three months, and though the November 2012 general election is still more than 15 months away, the Obama cash machine is running at full tilt.

The campaign filed its fundraising report with the Federal Election Commission for the period between April and June last week, reporting a haul of over $46 million. On top of that was another $36 million raised jointly with the Democratic National Committee. The totals put the Obama campaign on track to make 2012 another record election for money raised and spent.

As the Washington Post reports, the Obama reelection campaign rarely misses an opportunity to tout its “grassroots” fundraising base and that a large total of the money raised during the most recent three-month period came in donations of less than $200. But such spin masks the reality of the members of the president’s core big-money contributors, so-called “bundlers” that are the cream of the American upper-class elite. And the pace of the same small-scale donations that the campaign loves to advertise actually has fallen behind that of Obama’s 2008 campaign.

The Obama campaign has sought to emphasize the grass-roots side of his fundraising operation, noting that donors who gave $200 or less accounted for about a third of his total. The campaign says it had 550,000 donors in the second quarter, with an average contribution of less than $70.

Politico reports that an even larger percentage of the total $86 million that Obama’s reelection campaign raised in conjunction with the DNC came from these deep-pocketed “bundlers”; around 40 percent. 27 individuals and couples make up an exclusive group of what could be called “super bundlers,” supporters that raised at least $500,000 for Obama and the Democratic Party.

About 40 percent of President Barack Obama’s record-breaking $86 million second-quarter fundraising haul came from big-money bundlers, according to a POLITICO analysis of donors listed on Obama’s campaign web site.

No fewer than 27 mega-bundlers managed to collect at least $500,000 for a joint account run by Obama’s 2012 campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

That exclusive circle included marquee fundraisers like Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, Hollywood titan Jeffrey Katzenberg, DNC treasurer/personal finance guru Andrew Tobias and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who was CEO of Goldman Sachs before entering politics.

That group chipped in a minimum of $13.5 million, according to records. In addition, $21.4 million was bundled in amounts of between $50,000 and $499,000.

Who makes up this group of elite cheerleaders for the president? Besides the high-profile names listed by Politico, the Obama campaign’s website is required to list the names of everyone that raised at least $50,000 for the joint Obama 2012-DNC account. Included in the list online are the 27 “super bundlers” that delivered $500,000+.

The massive haul from April to June is no accident, as the president’s reelection team has made it a priority to tap into the burgeoning wealth of the corporate elite and Wall Street to stuff the coffers of the Obama 2012 reelection bid. With some of the president’s polices having been met with opposition by the business community, the Obama team has made an effort to woo corporate leaders and Wall Street executives in hopes of tapping their wealth into the president’s bid for a second term.

As an article in the New York Times points out, such tactics included special meetings with business leaders at the White House hosted by President Obama himself, part of an “aggressive push” to “win back” one of the president’s “most vital sources of campaign cash.”

A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.

The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.

Mr. Obama, who enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them “fat cats” and criticizing their bonuses, followed up the meeting with phone calls to those who could not attend.

The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But President Obama is far from alone in making the outcome of the 2012 election as much about counting cash as counting votes.

His main Republican rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney, raised nearly $20 million last quarter and has a vast personal fortune estimated to be at least $250 million.

Even more important for Republicans than the money raised by individual candidates is the pipeline of corporate cash flowing into “independent expenditure” groups unaffiliated with specific campaigns. These groups, run by the likes of Karl Rove and the Kochs, were created in the vacuum of campaign finance regulation left after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the “Citizen’s United” case.

Groups like American Crossroads and individuals like Charles and David Koch made their mark in the 2010 elections with a flood of “independent” cash spent on advertising and other means of campaigning for conservative and “pro-business” candidates and causes.

Both groups promise to increase their efforts in 2012, with Rove’s “American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS” pledging to spend at least $120 million in 2012, and the Koch brothers vowing to raise and spend at least $88 million.