Financial Profile Friday: Barack Obama

I’m waiting with bated breath for the FEC to release the fourth quarter filings of presidential candidates finances. They were due yesterday, but could take up to a month to actually get out to all of us curious folk. In the meanwhile, we’re still working off of information from last September when looking at finances.

Barack Obama is today’s focus. The breakdown of his funding is very interesting: Like most candidates, he hasn’t taken federal funds, and he hasn’t self-financed his campaign (Mitt Romney remains the only candidate heavily subsidizing his own campaign). But Obama has taken almost no funds from PACs — 99 percent of his funding is from individual contributors. Most of the other candidates have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from various PACs.

When it comes to all of those personal contributions, Obama is  money from a wide variety of sources. Individuals associated from Goldman Sachs (banking), Lehman Brothers (banking) and National Amusements, Inc. (media) make up the list of his top three contributors, but contributions from individuals from both Harvard University and University of California have managed to put both of those schools into the top 20.  No other major candidate — even down to Ron Paul — has managed to raise enough money at any school for that school to rank in their top 20 contributors.
And where is that money going? By far, it’s being spent on salaries — $12.7 million, not counting funds spent on consultants, which totals up to another $2.2 million. The next biggest expense for the Obama campaign is travel: $4.8 million. These expenditures are especially interesting because of the conspicuous ranking of advertisements of various sorts farther down the list. While a significant chunk of the $44 million that Obama had managed to spend by last September has gone to various media, he seems to be prioritizing his spending a little differently than the rest of the candidates.

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