The Obama campaign launched a neat fundraising program this week to get going on their way to America’s first $1 billion marketing campaign for a political candidate.  The program matches first time donors with previous donors who agreed to participate it a matching program.

Cool stuff, but the rationale behind the need for such aggressive fundraising was just as eye-catching:

Taking ownership of the campaign is an essential part of the experience, right alongside making phone calls, knocking on doors, and taking responsibility for getting your network of friends, colleagues, and neighbors to join us.

Relying on each other to own this campaign isn’t just the most viable way we can grow a truly grassroots organization — it’s also the right way to do politics. Taking money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs is the easy path — and every single one of our prospective opponents is racing down it.

Taking giant pools of money from political interests?  Not a chance.  The right way to do things is for individuals – not institutions – to each do their part and take responsibility to do things on their own.  Anything else would be a shortcut, doomed to create unintended consequences and fail.

At least, that’s how it works for political campaigns.  If it’s something like health care, retirement, or taking care of the less fortunate then, by all means, surrender control to centralized political entities.

Even better if they are run by special interests.

The President’s re-election campaign sent out an email to supporters last week, linking to a video of campaign manager Jim Messina giving them a sneak peek at the plan for 2012.  With such ground-breaking strategy points as “get more votes than the other guy” and “keep track of our progress,” the video was clearly more about motivation than actual information, but it earned the campaign a round of earned media.

Politico got into the act early, chatting up the revived online effort – but like much of the coverage of the 2008 campaign, the real story isn’t what’s happening online but what’s happening offline:

The leadership of the field organization — with hundreds of employees, tens of thousands of volunteers and massive online assets (primarily, a giant email list) — is shifting from the Democratic National Committee to the new campaign in Chicago. And in mass emails and in a quiet series of one-on-one meetings with volunteer leaders, the group is resetting its relationship with its supporters.

Hundreds of employees?  Sooner rather than later, that number will grow even larger, and the field offices will multiply in critical states.  The real key is not the list of email addresses, but in the resources: with spending on the re-election campaign expected to top $1 billion, there will be plenty of people available to mobilize grassroots supporters.  And while there will likely be some folks turning away from the President, a well-funded field operation can help drag out the votes to put them over the top in the right states to get to 270 electoral votes.

At a time when much of the country is figuring out how to do more with less, the Obama campaign will have the opportunity to do less with more.