WaPo:
President Obama is struggling to draw in big-dollar donations, with half as many people writing large checks to his campaign than at this point four years ago.
Obama is outpacing his Republican rivals in fundraising overall, and his advisers have concentrated on amassing small-dollar backers, part of a strategy to get more people invested in the reelection effort. At the end of January, 1.4 million people had donated to the Obama campaign, responding to appeals for contributions as small as $2.
But Obama lags behind Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in finding donors willing to give $2,000 or more — a surprising development for a sitting president, and one that could signal more worrisome financial problems heading into the general election. At this point in the last election cycle, Obama had received such large donations from more than 23,000 supporters, more than double the 11,000 who have given him that much this time. President George W. Bush had more than four times that number of big donations at this point in his reelection.
The problem is this: The rich still win because Obama is a moderate. By completely rejecting Obama, a politician who is far from anything that looks like socialism, the rich leave the poor and middle class with nothing but the middle of the political spectrum, when what we really need for proper representation is a candidate who is actually on the left of the spectrum. The rich want the far right in power, we are left with the middle, and the far left is left vacant.
