Obama Caught Lying

Again.

"In the 2008 campaign, you got a lot of money, about $1 million from employees of Goldman Sachs," Harwood said. "Your former White House counsel Greg Craig is apparently going to represent Goldman Sachs. In light of this case, do either of those things embarrass you?"

"No," Obama said. "First of all, I got a lot of money from a lot of people. And the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country. And moreover, anybody who gave me money during the course of my campaign knew that I was on record again in 2007, and 2008, pushing very strongly that we needed to reform how Wall Street did business. And so, nobody should be surprised in the position that I'm taking now because it is one that I was very clear about in the course of the campaign."

What jumped out at us in this exchange was Obama's statement, "the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country." We've seen that statement repeated elsewhere, but the evidence doesn't back it up.

Campaign contributions are public record, so there's verifiable data on how much political candidates receive and who gives it to them. Obama did raise a lot of money from small donations collected over the Internet, and several groups have analyzed the information to determine how much that was. While Obama got more money from small donors than his opponents, they did not account for the majority of his funds. We're setting the bar for a small donor as someone who gives $200 or less. The Federal Election Commission rules say that someone who gives this amount does not need to publicly disclose their name, address, occupation and employer.

In the general election, Obama got about 34 percent of his individual donations from small donors, people who gave $200 or less, according to a report from the Campaign Finance Institute. Another 23 percent of donations came from people who gave between $201 and $999, and another 42 percent from people who gave $1,000 or more.