Tales from the Trail

As part of his strategy to raise money and excitement for his re-election bid, President Barack Obama and his advisers are starting to use a new warning: winning in 2012 may be harder than it was in 2008.

For a incumbent Democratic president who is routinely beating potential Republican rivals in polls, it may seem a bit early to paint oneself as the underdog.

But Obama and his team want to make it clear that it won’t be a cakewalk to hold on to the White House, even though this time around the former Illinois senator is not an unknown figure.

“This is going to be just as hard, if not harder, than 2008,” the president told the first of three fundraising events in Los Angeles on Thursday evening. “Our work is not finished,” he said at the second.

The president was expected to raise about $2 million at the events for his and and the Democratic party’s campaign coffers. Donors spent between $100 and $35,800 to hear him speak — or give him an earful.

The trials and triumphs of immigrants to the United States were an unexpected theme of a pricey fundraiser in Rockville, Maryland, where President Barack Obama helped raise $400,000 for Democratic Senate candidates on Monday night.

It started with Obama’s introduction by the house party’s host, Rajeev Sharma, chairman of a company, who told the crowd how his parents and in-laws had moved to the United States many years earlier and had worked hard to build a life for their families — one cleaning stalls and one with only 8 dollars in his pocket when he arrived. “They worked hard, became Americans… And now they’re meeting the leader of the free world at the home of their children,” Sharma said, obviously moved.

Obama, whose father was from Kenya, picked up the theme in his comments, making the case to the audience of donors that supporting Democratic candidates would preserve the American dream of immigrants like the Sharma parents.

Those media naysayers are troubling President Obama again.

The U.S. leader, who hasn’t had a prime-time news conference in six months, made clear his aggravation with the scribblers in remarks Thursday to a Democratic fundraiser at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

As the tony crowd, who were asked to  pay $30,400 per couple, dined on beet salad, beef and Brussels sprouts, the president laid out his case against the unruly nabobs of negativism.

They were the ones who declared his presidential campaign dead about a dozen times.