Tales from the Trail

He’s been president of the United States for about two-and-a-half  years, but Barack Obama still remembers being a “start-up” — and he wouldn’t mind being as popular as SpongeBob SquarePants.

The Democratic president, who is in the middle of a road show to sell his ideas for cutting the deficit, spent the evening in San Francisco on Wednesday raising money for his campaign, and he targeted tech-savvy donors who had started successful companies of their own.

“Some of you are involved in start-ups, well I was a start-up just not so long ago,” Obama told a dinner fundraiser at the home of Marc Benioff, the chief executive of salesforce.com.

There’s big money in California. Donors paid as much as $35,800  a piece to dine with the president or hear him speak.

Earlier in the day the president held a townhall meeting at the social networking giant Facebook. At a second fundraiser later in the evening, he said he was pleased that his own Facebook page was so popular.

“I’ve got 19 million friends,” he marveled, noting, however, that he was less loved than the cartoon character SpongeBob.

Something to aspire to, he said.

PHOTO CREDIT: REUTERS/Jim Young (Obama greets people after stepping off Air Force One at San Francisco International Airport)