Where Obama REALLY Got His Money, BP or the Financial Sector?

A Politico story is reporting that Obama received campaign contributions from BP, so I decided to do a little digging.

My first stop was opensecrets.org, a website that tracks every politician’s campaign funds (income and expenditures). 

Here is what I found for the 2010 presidential election.  While this doesn’t mean that the money was from BP itself, it was from the industry.  Interesting to note: McCain received almost $2.5 million… that’s a big gap between him and Obama’s $900,000.

Joe Biden received money too, which you could assume would’ve been rolled up into Obama’s fund if any of that money was left.  So that brings the Obama campaign’s total to $920,454.

From there, I checked Obama’s top contributors to his 2010 campaign.  These are individual companies (or their PACs), rather than an entire industry as a whole.  BP wasn’t on there, or any other oil company.  Here is what I found: Goldman Sachs, his #2 contributor.  Despite the contributions Obama is pushing for finance reform, which would include Goldman Sachs.  As bad as their image is, there is no way Obama could work to support them.  The same holds true for Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase & Co.  UBS AG is also an investment banking/asset management firm, with locations all over the world.  And finally, Morgan Stanley is near the bottom of the list.  A grand total of $3,449,317 from the financial sector. 

In fact, President Obama received a total of $14,891,735 from the securities and investments sector, another $6,309,267 from “misc. banking”, and another $3,316,351 from commercial banks; bringing his total from the financial sector to $27,966,670.  Its amazing he is pushing finance reform at all, although it has taken him over a year to get started on it.  Perhaps he finally realized that finance reform is what the public wants and if Democrats want to do well in Novmber, he needs to address it and show he is focused on the economy still.

University of California	$1,591,395
Goldman Sachs	$994,795
Harvard University	$854,747
Microsoft Corp	$833,617
Google Inc	$803,436
Citigroup Inc	$701,290
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$695,132
Time Warner	$590,084
Sidley Austin LLP	$588,598
Stanford University	$586,557
National Amusements Inc	$551,683
UBS AG	$543,219
Wilmerhale Llp	$542,618
Skadden, Arps et al	$530,839
IBM Corp	$528,822
Columbia University	$528,302
Morgan Stanley	$514,881
General Electric	$499,130
US Government	$494,820
Latham & Watkins	$493,835

But, back to the oil companies.  This chart shows contributions from the oil/natural gas industry to politicians by party for 2010.  If you check out the site you can see the list for past years, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is even larger with each previous year back to 2002.  The last year in which Democrats received such a high percentage was in 1994, with 38%.  Democrats aren’t completely off the hook.  The top recipient of the oil/natural gas industry’s money?  Senator Blanche Lincoln, the Democrat from Arkansas.  Which explains why she is coming out for continued oil drilling in the wake of the spill in Louisiana.

All of that said, BP itself did donate $71,051 to Obama’s campaign in 2008, and $36,649 to McCain’s campaign.  Overall in 2008, it donated $195,415 to Democrats and $190,949 to Republicans in 2008.  Most of the Democrat’s money went to the Senate ($105,152) and a little over half of the Republican’s money went to the Senate as well ($95,749).

So far in 2010, BP has donated $45,550 to Democrats and $53,000 to Republicans.  Most of the money in both parties has gone to the House so far.  The top recipients so far are Senate candidate Jack Conway (D-KY), Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Ark.), and Senator Lincoln (D-Ark.).