If Obama wants the money, he's got to show the love

Let's begin with the numbers. President Obama's campaign has $88 million in the bank. Mitt Romney's campaign has $30 million in the bank. The Obama campaign plus the Democratic National Committee has $123.7 million in the bank. The Romney campaign plus the Republican National Committee has $185.9 million in the bank. And that advantage is increasing month by month.

What's more, the major Romney-affiliated super PACs have tens of millions more in the bank. American Crossroads, for instance, is sitting on $29 million. Restore Our Future is sitting on $20 million. Priorities USA, the major Obama-affiliated super PAC, is sitting on $4 million.

So here's what we can say with certainty: Romney is winning the money race. Big-time. And he's pressing that advantage.

This raises two questions. First, why is the Obama team doing so horribly at fundraising? And, second, will Romney's cash advantage actually matter?

In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer argues that the Obama team is doing so horribly at fundraising because, well, its members have done a horrible job at the literal work of fundraising. They've simply neglected to stroke and flatter their biggest donors.

That goes from the big things, such as granting audiences with the president, to small things, such as getting pictures with the president. Mayer quotes one Obama fundraiser who says that "unlike Republicans, [Obama's donors] have no business interest being furthered by the donation -- they just like to be involved. So it makes them more needy. It's like, 'If you're not going to deregulate my industry or lower my taxes, can't I at least get a picture?'"

In the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai echoes Mayer's thesis that the Obama team has done poorly at the care-and-feeding work of fundraising but says that the true culprit is the structure of this election, not the ego of the donors. After all, in 2008, the Obama campaign shattered all previous fundraising records.

I think both Bai and Mayer get at part of the truth. But I also think that Romney's epic fundraising partially reflects another trend that benefited Obama in 2008: The financial class's tendency to gravitate toward the candidate that's most like them.

In 2008, Obama was most like them. He was a cool, cerebral, analytical, cosmopolitan, product of the Ivy League. He's the sort of guy who might well have had a successful career on Wall Street. After eight years of the George W. Bush administration and faced with the prospect of four years of John McCain, Wall Street people wanted someone who they thought of as like them to clean up the mess. And what Wall Street wants, it spends a lot of money to get.

But in 2012, Mitt Romney is most like Wall Street. In fact, Romney is the financial class. He worked in finance. He has a business degree from Harvard. He shares its hatred of deficits, its belief that the rich are being unfairly blamed for today's problems, its conviction that its work is of great social value, its certainty that if only politicians were more like titans of finance and industry, the country would be in a far better place. Obama, meanwhile, doesn't seem to respect Wall Street that much. And if there's anything that's fundamental to the finance class, it is respect.

The question is whether it matters. Romney and the super PACs have outspent Obama. Yet Obama's lead has remained curiously persistent. Romney, in fact, has fallen further behind in the polls over the past month, and most operatives will tell you that he's in worse shape in the battleground states, which is where the vast majority of this advertising is going.

Now, perhaps Obama would be winning in a rout if Romney didn't have a money advantage. And perhaps the Romney campaign will dump enough money on Obama's head in the final month or so that it will have a real and measurable impact in the polls. You can't rerun the past, and I don't have much information about the future. But for now, Romney's money advantage has not yet proven decisive.