Jim Messina

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.

WASHINGTON - As he launches his second term, President Obama may get help from an ambitious new political organization being built out of his reelection campaign, a group that could reshape how future presidents harness supporters to press their White House agendas. Run by former Obama campaign officials, the advocacy group will seek to leverage the campaign's sophisticated organizing tools and rich voter database to support the president's policy objectives, including raising the debt ceiling, gun control and immigration reform.

Tickets for two shows at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim go on sale today: En Vogue and Arrested Development (Oct. 18) and the Rippingtons and Larry Carlton (Nov. 7). . . . Doug Stone plays the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana on Sept. 21-22. . . . Jim Messina and Randy Meisner will be at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Oct. 10.

Musicians Jackson Browne, Michael McDonald and Collective Soul, actor Jeff Bridges and pro surfer Tom Curren are among the scheduled participants in a benefit concert Saturday in Santa Barbara to help victims of the Jan. 11 La Conchita landslide that left 10 people dead, more than a dozen homes destroyed and several others were left too dangerous to enter. "These people have lost everything," said Jean Sievers, one of the concert organizers.

WASHINGTON - As President Obama mounts an aggressive campaign on what he calls tax fairness, his own tax burden has fallen to the lowest of his time in the White House, lower than many who make far less - including his secretary. The president and first lady reported a joint adjusted gross income of $789,674 last year and paid $162,074 in federal taxes, or about 20.5%, according to the tax return released Friday by the White House. That income keeps the Obamas in the top 1% of taxpayers.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Btw, send $$ 2nite. Thx! Democrats tried out some new technology at their convention on Thursday, asking supporters to send in cash via text. President Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, a metrics-obsessed campaign technician, got the honors of the doing the asking, and he asked for donations from the podium of the Democratic National Convention. “Every morning, the first thing I read are the numbers from the day before,” Messina told the crowd. “Not poll numbers or money.

Just as President Obama's top campaign advisors are arguing that the prolonged GOP primary is raising controversial issues that will alienate the eventual GOP nominee from independent and swing voters in the fall, Democrats are facing a similar quandary. On Wednesday morning, the chairman of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, called for the party's platform to push for the legalization of gay marriage. That's a position opposed by Obama -- though he's said his views on the issue are "evolving" -- and one that many Democrats ostensibly would not want to have highlighted a few months before the general election.

WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are accusing President Obama's White House, and at least one key member of his reelection team, of breaking Obama's 2008 campaign promise to make the executive branch more transparent. The accusation is contained in a report, released Tuesday night by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which suggests that White House officials purposefully avoided disclosing key meetings and discussions by moving emails through personal accounts and taking off-campus meetings with lobbyists.