The Obama fundraising machine is truly astonishing:

A cluster of cramped cubicles, tucked away in a rear corner of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters here, comprises the heart of a fund-raising machine that has reshaped the calculus of the 2008 election.

Mr. Obama’s finance director, Julianna Smoot, who has helped him raise more than $150 million so far, does not even have her own office. A ping-pong table is the gathering spot for Friday lunches for her team.

The setting, which has the feel of an Internet start-up, is emblematic of how Mr. Obama has been able to raise heaps of cash. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign will report to the Federal Election Commission that it collected $36 million in January — $4 million more than campaign officials had previously estimated — an unprecedented feat for a single month in American politics that was powered overwhelmingly by small online donations. That dwarfed the $13.5 million in January that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to report Wednesday and the $12 million Senator John McCain’s campaign said he brought in for the month.

This could well have been the tipping point in the race:

But it was the two days following Mr. Obama’s stunning loss to Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire that campaign officials point to as when they began to realize they were in for an extraordinary month.

On the evening of the primary, Mr. Obama’s finance staff settled in watch the results from their cubicles. When the television networks called the race for Mrs. Clinton, their spirits sagged. But Ms. Burdick was staring at her laptop, watching a graph showing how much money was coming into the campaign from donations over the Internet. Within minutes, it was shooting upward.

“This is crazy,” said Ms. Burdick, calling over to two of her colleagues sitting near her.

Within three hours the campaign had cleared $500,000. In the morning, when Ms. Burdick woke up and checked her laptop again, the campaign had raised $750,000. Over the course of two days, Mr. Obama collected $4.4 million online.

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February 19, 2008

Makeshift Office at Heart of Obama Fund-Raising

By MICHAEL LUO

www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/politics/19cnd-obama.html

CHICAGO — A cluster of cramped cubicles, tucked away in a rear corner of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters here, comprises the heart of a fund-raising machine that has reshaped the calculus of the 2008 election.