| |
Re-Election Campaign
October 07, 2010 @ 4:55:34 PM EST
Obama has more than $68 million for his campaign and the Democratic Party during the final three months of 2011, a show of force that allows him to compete – for now at least – in the new reality of freewheeling outside political groups.
The latest infusion of money, announced Thursday, adds up to more than $220 million in 2011 for the president's re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, putting Obama far ahead of other Republican presidential candidates. In most years, it might amount to a substantial fundraising advantage, but a flurry of super PACs and big-dollar independent groups have changed the rules of campaign money.
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a video to supporters that they collected more than $42 million for the quarter, with the DNC bringing in more than $24 million, along with $1 million for a joint fund to help state parties in key states. That beat an internal goal of $60 million combined for the quarter.
It came a day after the campaign of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney said it had raised $56 million for the primary through Dec. 31, including $24 million during the final three months of 2011.
Yet, even with the current money advantage over Romney and the rest of the GOP field, Democrats are hoping to remain competitive with Republicans because of the dominance of outside groups.
GOP-supportive super PACs have raised tens of millions of dollars this primary season, notably the Romney-leaning Restore Our Future and American Crossroads, which has said it plans to raise more than $200 million this election cycle. American Crossroads has ties to Karl Rove, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush,
Later this month, the outside groups are expected to disclose how much they have collected during the past six months, figures that will shed more light on their influence.
"We face some daunting odds ... to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars," said Vice President Joe Biden, in a primary night address to New Hampshire Democrats. "These guys have these super PACs now on the Republican side that will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads. We're not going to have those hundreds of millions of dollars in super PACs."
Republicans counter that Obama is more concerned with his re-election campaign than with his job of running the country, pointing to his fundraising edge on the GOP field. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said "the White House may try to pretend the president isn't focused on his re-election, but Americans know he's more interested in campaigning to save his own job than creating jobs for our country's unemployed."
The president's campaign has watched with concern as the outside groups have escalated a race for political money and roiled the Republican primary season, most notably the campaign of Newt Gingrich.
The former House speaker built a lead in Iowa only to watch it erode under a $3 million tidal wave of negative ads launched by the outside group supporting Romney, who eventually won a razor-thin victory in the leadoff caucuses. Gingrich finished fourth.
Restore Our Future has reserved $2.3 million in air time in South Carolina ahead of the states' primaries, while a pro-Gingrich group, Winning Our Future, has said it plans to spend $3.4 million on ads attacking Romney for jobs lost while he served as a top executive at private equity firm Bain Capital. Winning Our Future's effort was bankrolled by casino owner Sheldon Adelson, who gave $5 million to the pro-Gingrich super PAC. Outside groups backing Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum have also exerted influence.
Crossroads, for its part, says it is largely holding off ads until the general election, to counterbalance the anticipated flood of money from donors to Obama and the DNC.
Democratic-leaning groups like Priorities USA Action, founded by former Obama advisers, have not spent nearly the same amount as their GOP counterparts. Through late July, Priorities USA Action and sister organization Priorities USA had raised more than $5 million and has spent roughly $320,000 on ads and media-production costs opposing Romney, federal filings show.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign's senior strategist, said the emergence of the super PACs represented a "concerning dynamic" for Democrats, likening it to facing "the secret air force and have them carpet bomb relentlessly."
"The prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars of negative ads raining down on us is not a prospect that I relish," Axelrod said in a conference call with reporters last week. But he said Obama was "thoroughly known to the American people," making him less susceptible to negative attacks.
With the prospect of a deluge of money opposing the president, Obama's campaign has tried to bat away suggestions that it will raise more than $1 billion, a substantial boost from the $750 million it raised in 2008. Messina said in the video that the lofty figures have created "a challenge that keeps coming up. Too many Obama supporters think we don't need their money or they don't need to give now."
"The billion-dollar number is completely untrue," Messina said.
Obama's campaign has emphasized a large number of donors and small donations generated from online giving. Messina said the campaign and DNC had generated 1.3 million donors, with 583,000 people giving during the most recent quarter. More than 98 percent were for donations of $250 or less and the average donation was $55, he said.
The money will help build Obama's organization, pay for a massive advertising campaign and let his advisers prepare for the upcoming campaign, a point the president emphasized at a large Chicago fundraiser on Wednesday night.
"If you're willing to work even harder in this election than you did in that last election, I promise you change will come," Obama said. "If you stick with me, we're going to finish what we started in 2008."
___
Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this report.
___
Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas
Also on HuffPost:
Born in Hawaii
Obama is actually of mixed heritage. He was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, where his parents had met at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus. His father, Barack Sr., was from Kenya and entered the University of Hawaii as its first-ever student from an African country. He was a member of Kenya's Luo ethnic group, many of whom played a key role in that country's struggle for independence in the 1950s. Obama's mother, Ann Durham, was originally from Kansas, where some of her ancestors had been anti-slavery activists in the 1800s.
The marriage between Obama's parents was a short-lived one, however. In the early 1960s, interracial relationships were still quite rare in many parts of America, and even technically illegal in some states. The Durhams were accepting of Barack Sr., but his family in Kenya had a harder time with the idea of his marryinga white American woman. When Obama was two years old they divorced, and his father left Hawaii to enter Harvard University to earn a Ph.D. in economics. The two Baracks met again only once, when Obama was ten, though they did write occasionally. Barack Sr. eventually returned to Kenya and died in a car accident there in the early 1980s.
Obama's mother remarried a man from Indonesia who worked in the oil industry, and when Obama was six they moved there. The family lived near the capital of Jakarta, where his half-sister Maya was born. At the age of ten, Obama returned to Hawaii and lived with his maternal grandparents; later his mother and sister returned as well. Called "Barry" by his family and friends, he was sent to a prestigious private academy in Honolulu, the Punahou School, where he was one of just a handful of black students. Obama recalled feeling conflicted
"In no other country on earth is my story even possible."
about his mixed heritage in his teen years. Outside the house, he was considered African American, but the only family he knew was his white one at home. For a time, he loafed and let his grades slip; instead of studying, he spent hours on the basketball court with his friends, and has admitted that there was a time when he experimented with drugs, namely marijuana and cocaine. "I was affected by the problems that I think a lot of young African American teens have," he reflected in an interview with Kenneth Meeks for Black Enterprise. "They feel that they need to rebel against society as a way of proving their blackness. And often, this results in self-destructive behavior."
Excels at Harvard Law School
Obama graduated from Punahou and went on to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he decided to get serious about his studies. Midway through, he transferred to the prestigious Columbia University in New York City. He also began to explore his African roots and not long after his father's death traveled to meet his relatives in Kenya for the first time. After he earned his undergraduate degree in political science, he became a community organizer in Harlem—but quickly realized he could not afford to live in the city with a job that paid so little. Instead, he moved to Chicago to work for a church-based social-services organization there. The group was active on the city's South Side, one of America's most impoverished urban communities.
Feeling it was time to move on, Obama applied to and was accepted at Harvard Law School, one of the top three law schools in the United States. In 1990, he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review journal. He was the first African American to serve in the post, which virtually assured him of any career path he chose after graduation. But Obama declined the job offers from top Manhattan law firms, with their starting salaries that neared the $100,000-a-year range, in order to return to Chicago and work for a small firm that specialized in civil-rights law. This was an especially unglamorous and modest-paying field of law, for it involved defending the poor and the marginalized members of society in housing and employment discrimination cases.
Obama also had another reason for returning to Chicago: During his Harvard Law School years, he took a job as a summer associate at a Chicago firm, and the attorney assigned to mentor him was also a Harvard Law graduate, Michelle Robinson. The two began dating and were married in 1992. Robinson came from a working-class black family and grew up on the South Side; her brother had excelled at basketball and went to Princeton University, and she followed him there for her undergraduate degree. Obama also considered Chicago a place from which he could launch a political career, and he became active in a number of projects in addition to his legal cases at work and another job he held teaching classes at the University of Chicago Law School. He worked on a local voter-registration drive, for example, that registered thousands of black voters in Chicago; the effort was said to have helped Bill Clinton (1946–) win the state in his successful bid for the White House in 1992.
Read more: Barack Obama Biography - life, family, children, parents, story, history, wife, school, mother, young http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Li-Ou/Obama-Barack.html#ixzz1kVZl3IL9
Regards,
Stanley Krol/CEO/admin/tech-support
Texting is "NOW" the number #2 form of communication Worldwide and "GROWING" faster each day. Worlds #1 is still face to face speaking.
.
Billions of text messages are sent every year from our kids' ((Highest percentage)mobile phones. While most kids use messaging responsibly, it's still a powerful and extremely private communication tool that needs to be used responsibly. (For tips on how to text message www.Texted.me
Why understanding texting is important
Texting is totally portable, private, and immediate. Kids can send messages to anyone from anywhere at anytime. In other words, they have no boundaries unless we help them to establish some. Almost no research has been done on the impact of immediate communication on our kids' social development.
But the instant gratification factor of getting instantaneous responses from friends has to have some affect. Any parent who has been at the dinner table or on a hike with a child only to have their pockets buzz with an incoming message knows that texts take your kids out of the moment they are in and connect them to distant friends.
Texts can be used to keep friends close, help parents figure out family logistics, and offer a wonderful way to share experiences. But as with any powerful tool, texting can also be used to bully or humiliate people. An embarrassing or upsetting image or video can quickly be transmitted or uploaded to on online video sharing site like YouTube. Sexting is a form of texting where kids Kids have to know that the abusing the privilege of texting will have consequences. And sadly, the use of texting in school cheating is on the rise as answers can be swiftly passed from student to student.
Parent Tips
- Carefully evaluate whether or not your kids need texting on their cellphones. Just because other kids in their class have it doesn't mean your child needs it.
- If your kids do text, get an unlimited texting plan. Otherwise the charges mount up swiftly.
- Make rules around when and where. No texting during meals, during class, on family outings. Oh, and turn the phone OFF at night!
- Establish consequences for misuse. Cheating, inappropriate messages, sexual communication. These are all no-go's. Want to make your point? Take a kid's phone away for a week.
- Watch your own behavior. Parents are still kids' playbooks for right and wrong. If you text your kid during class and then turn around and tell that child that he or she can't do that, we send mixed messages.
- If you suspect your kids aren't texting appropriately, you can always look at their messages. Yes, it feels like snooping, but our first job as parents is to ensure our kids use powerful technologies safely and responsibly.
|
|
