Money

According to just released disclosure forms, President Barack Obama has between $500,000-1,000,000 in assets in a JP Morgan Chase account. The full title of the account, as it's written on the disclosures, is "JPMorgan Chase Private Client Asset Mgmt Checking Account." It is a jointly held account, presumably with First Lady Michelle Obama.

President Obama is attending a fundraiser today in New York City that will be hosted by Hamilton E. James, the chief operating officer and president of Blackstone. The financial firm Blackstone is "one of the world's largest private equity fund businesses," according to its website.

But ironically, Obama today is using Mitt Romney's background in private equity as the basis of an attack on his Republican rival.

Bill Maher, the largest donor to President Obama's super PAC, called Mormonism a "cult" on his HBO show last night, and said that donating money to that religion doesn't count as charity because it's "bulls---."

In a Sunday story in the New York Times, former congressman Patrick Kennedy alleged "quid pro quo" access to the White House.

Access to the Obama White House is in direct correlation to the amount of money donated to the president's reelection effort and the Democratic party, the New York Times reports today.

President Obama is in full campaign mode today, attending five fundraisers in two cities, Chicago and Atlanta. The AP reports: 

President Barack Obama is embarking on a concentrated one-day fundraising trip, with a stop in his hometown of Chicago and another in Atlanta for a big-draw event with film producer Tyler Perry and performer Cee Lo Green.

Back when Rick Santorum was driving around Iowa in the “Chuck Truck,” the ratio between Mitt Romney’s and Santorum’s respective fundraising hauls was far greater than the ratio between the respective payrolls of the Boston Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates. For every $1 that Santorum raised in 2011, Romney raised $26. In all, Santorum raised $2.2 million that year, to Romney’s $56.5 million.

Rick Santorum reportedly raised $9 million in February. That’s almost ten times what he raised in the entire fourth quarter of 2011 ($917,000), twice what he raised in January ($4.5 million), and 40 percent more than Mitt Romney raised in January ($6.2 million).

This may come as a shock to many pollsters and much of the press corps, but public opinion is a little more complicated than randomly calling 1,000 Americans, asking them a dubiously worded question about a complex political issue, and reporting the aggregate results.

Zeke Miller of BuzzFeed reports:

Mitt Romney is running out of rich people.

Here’s how many votes the respective Republican presidential candidates got in Florida for every $1,000 that they or their super PACs spent on TV advertising in the state (according to ad figures published by the Washington Post as of Friday):

There’s a lot of silliness on all sides of the Bain Capital debate.

On the one hand, Newt Gingrich’s attacks (and the follow-on assaults by Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry) on Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital have been unfair, over the top, and, for that matter, all over the place. Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman deserve much of the criticism they’ve received from conservative commentators.

On the other, Mitt Romney’s claim throughout his campaign that his private sector experience almost uniquely qualifies him to be president is also silly. Does he really think that having done well in private equity, venture capital, and business consulting—or even in the private sector more broadly—is a self-evident qualification for public office? One assumes Mitt Romney would agree that Chris Christie is a better chief executive of New Jersey than Jon Corzine, and that Rudy Giuliani was a better mayor of New York than Mike Bloomberg. But Romney’s biography looks a lot more like Bloomberg's or Corzine's (leaving aside Corzine's recent misadventures) than like that of Giuliani (pre-mayoralty) or Christie. Past business success does not guarantee performance in public office. Indeed, Romney sometimes seems to go so far as to suggest that succeeding in the private sector is intrinsically more admirable than, e.g., serving as a teacher or a soldier or even in Congress. This is not a sensible proposition, or a defensible one.