Obama Confronts 'Outsider' Dilemma

To that end, the Obama campaign spent the weekend moving its headquarters to Chicago (far away, they note, from the sprawling Clinton offices on K Street) and organizing Obama's official campaign debut this Saturday in Springfield, Ill.

And they are already bumping up against the realities of riding his booming grass-roots support while obeying the conventions of running for president. Logistical concerns, such as how much time to spend campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, are at odds with the imperative for him to prove his seriousness in the Senate.

The task of raising millions of dollars to survive the primaries is competing with Obama's core image as a fresh face -- a familiar dilemma for a professed outsider, but one that his advisers and rivals alike believe he can overcome.

Perhaps most important, Obama's strategists are scrambling to manage expectations. "Given the need to build a fundraising infrastructure and the fact that we do not accept contributions from federal lobbyists and political action committees, raising $8 to $10 million in the first quarter would be great news," spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said.

"An Obama campaign clearly has tremendous fundraising potential in the long term," Pfeiffer said. "But it is absurd to assume that we should raise as much or more than others who have been building fundraising networks for years and years."

Rivals in the Democratic contest contend that he could raise as much as $40 million, potentially raking in $1 million in a single Hollywood fundraiser, and will all but fail an early test of his viability if he comes up with less than former North Carolina senator John Edwards before April. Edwards is expected to raise as much as $15 million in the first quarter, and Clinton is expected to raise as much as $30 million, though both of those campaigns, like Obama's, insist they could take in less.

"By all accounts, Obama is poised for a huge fundraising quarter," said Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson, predicting that Obama will raise $25 million or more. Wolfson played down the notion that Obama's campaign needs time to get up to speed. "You can build an operation fairly quickly if you know what you're doing, and I suspect they know what they're doing," he said.

Still, Clinton spent more than $30 million during the 2006 election cycle, much of it on building an infrastructure, including a donor database, that could be used in her presidential bid. That puts a gulf between her and her rivals, including Obama. "Nobody has ever come to the table with the built-in advantages that Hillary Clinton has," said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist advising Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) in the race. "She has had decades to build this organization, and clearly has been running for president more or less for six years, on top of everything else that was previously built for her husband."

Obama "started later than other people, and that's going to show for a while," Jordan said. "But ultimately that's not what's going to decide whether he wins."

Instead, he and others said, Obama will rise or fall on his ability to continue coming across as the candidate who is different, new and charismatic.

"If he tries to run a traditional campaign -- that is run, staffed, managed and operated in a traditional way -- he is playing to his opponents' strengths, both in terms of going head-to-head where they're going to be really strong, but also in terms of undermining a good chunk of his message," said Chris Lehane, a former spokesman for Al Gore who is not currently on the payroll of any presidential campaign.

It remains to be seen how the kind of nontraditional campaign Lehane envisions would work in a round-the-clock news environment. Would Obama decline to respond to attacks? Or to skewer his rivals? Or to answer activists' questionnaires? Or to give detailed answers about his views on policy? Or to play pop music and blast red-white-and-blue confetti at his events?

For now, the answer is yes.

"I think he is very focused on the fact that he doesn't want to lose his essential self in this process, and if he does -- and if what he projects and delivers is just more of the kind of politics people have become accustomed to -- it would be a disappointment to him, and to them," Axelrod said.

"It's not just how he delivers the message but how we deliver the message, and what kind of relationship we develop with our supporters," he said. "If this campaign is what it should be, this is not going to be the hoisting of an icon. It's going to be the movement of millions of people."