Obama raises $45 million in February

By Rick Moran

That is likely several times more than Mitt Romney raised.

In a statement released on Twitter, Obama's campaign said 348,000 people contributed last month and 105,000 people gave money for the first time.

Nearly 98 percent of the month's contributions were $250 or less, it said.

"Since April 2011, a total of 1.64 million people have pitched into own a piece of this campaign," the Twitter message said. Obama's Chicago-based re-election effort has spent the last several months building up a grassroots effort it hopes will help turn out the vote on Election Day in November.

Obama's campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and other joint fundraising committees raised a combined $29.1 million in January.

Campaign officials are concerned that outside groups known as Super PACs could outspend Obama in their quest to put a Republican in the White House.

Super PACs are political groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence political campaigns.

Obama held a five-event fundraising spree on Friday in Chicago and Atlanta, where he was projected to raise nearly $5 million or more.

The president is his campaign's best fundraising draw, and Obama has done roughly twice as many fundraisers at this point in his re-election effort as his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush, had done at the comparable time.

Not all is peachy for the president on the money front. The Washington Post is reporting that the president's high dollar donations are lagging compared to his 2008 numbers.

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.

His Super Pac only raised $2 million in February, far behind GOP Super Pacs. Obama is not going to lose the fundraising battle. But he may fall short of his billion dollar goal when all is said and done.