President Obama’s campaign has found itself scrambling to compete with Republican Mitt Romney in wealthy donors to write big checks for his re-election—primarily because so many of the big money donors from 2008 were given plum ambassadorships and are now overseas and employed by the government, meaning they aren’t allowed to donate to the campaign.
While Romney has an intimidating list of multimillionaires and billionaires to flood his campaign and his SuperPACS with cash, Obama is being forced to go find new rich folks to help him out this time. An analysis by the Huffington Post found a total of 28 former donors, now ambassadors of places like Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Canada, France and South Africa, who had raised more than $14 million for the president the last time around. Only one, Matthew Barzun of Kentucky, has quit his ambassadorship in Sweden to come back home and serve as Obama’s re-election finance director in Chicago.
The Obama campaign says it is not worried at all—they don’t expect any problems locating enough rich guys and gals to get Obama to his 2012 goal of $1 billion.
