Jim Messina

President Obama added an additional $43.6 million to Democratic coffers in April, a sum his campaign says will be put to quick use to build on its ground game for the fall. The monthly fundraising haul was down from the $53 million raised in March by Obama for America, the Democratic National Committee and two affiliate committees. The Republican National Committee also was quick to point out that Obama raised $32 million on his own in April 2008, without the advantage of incumbency.

While President Obama celebrated a victory on policy, the Obama campaign is treating the Supreme Court's decision on healthcare reform as another chance to raise questions about Mitt Romney's record and his plans for the country and calling his response to the ruling a "missed opportunity. " Though the high court's morning announcement surely set off celebration behind the scenes in the campaign's Chicago headquarters, its first public comment was light on self-congratulation and instead centered squarely on the Republican nominee.

The White House maintains that President Obama still is not in full-bore campaign mode yet. But in Chicago, his reelection team is marking a milestone and declaring itself "ready to go. " Fired up, too. "Happy bday OFA!" campaign manager Jim Messina announced on Twitter, using the shorthand for Obama for America. Indeed it was a year ago Wednesday that the campaign to reelect the president was launched, an announcement that came not from Obama himself, but in a YouTube video that aimed to present the effort as one driven from the grass-roots, not from the center of power in Washington.

It was a rocky May for the Obama campaign, and apparently it's already time for a pep talk. Just about a month ago, the president held the first public rallies of his campaign. But the campaign soon faced a hasty rollout of the president's new position on gay marriage, saw its first major attack message on Bain Capital undermined by leading surrogates, and faced new signs of trouble on the economy. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney was locking up his party's nomination and coalescing support, while polls showed a narrowing general election fight.

The mood in camp Obama is picking up these days, with the president's poll numbers inching northward and Republicans mired in what could turn out to be a prolonged, expensive battle for the GOP nomination. When Obama campaign officials look at a map of the U.S., they see any number of viable routes toward the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency. In a fundraising pitch Thursday, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina laid out five potential pathways to the magic number.

President Obama has said he will have plenty of time to campaign for reelection in 2012, but his fledgling campaign team is wasting no time. Days after leaving his post as White House deputy chief of staff, campaign manager Jim Messina spent the last week hopscotching across the country to hold sessions with prominent donors in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston. His outreach is part of an intense push to rebuild the finance operation that helped Obama raise a record $745 million in 2008.

President Obama's vast campaign operation raked in $86 million for his reelection and for the Democratic Party during the last three months, breaking previous records with a total far greater than those posted by his potential Republican opponents in the 2012 election. Initially, the Obama campaign had set a goal of raising $60 million. Republican candidates combined are expected to raise less than $35 million this quarter. Obama's haul points to the fundraising advantages of incumbency and to the staggering cost of the coming election, which in this cycle will feature a new, powerful role for independent groups that can raise unlimited sums.

His approval ratings are down and the economic recovery is sputtering. But President Obama brings to the 2012 campaign one strategic advantage that previous Democratic presidential candidates would have envied: the money to compete everywhere. Flush with more cash than all the Republican candidates combined, Obama's reelection campaign envisions an electoral map every bit as expansive as that of 2008, when he picked up a string of states that had been safe GOP territory for decades.

WASHINGTON -- The man who managed President Obama's successful reelection campaign said Tuesday that the Chicago-based operation will carry on in some form to advocate the president's second-term agenda, and may even engage in the debate over how to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. But before closing up shop in its current form, the analytics-driven Obama for America (OFA) has again turned to its massive online network to determine how best to do that. A survey emailed to supporters asked what kind of activities they'd like to see OFA engage in, including supporting Obama policy offerings and backing individual candidates in future campaigns.

CHICAGO - Early on election day, in two tight, tucked-away rooms at Obama headquarters known as the Cave and the Alley, the campaign's data-crunching team awaited the nation's first results, from Dixville Notch, a New Hampshire hamlet that traditionally votes at midnight. Dixville Notch split 5-5. It did not seem an auspicious outcome for the president. But for the math geeks and data wizards who spent more than a year devising sophisticated models to predict which voters would back the president, Dixville Notch was a victory.