Romney seeks GOP campaign fundraising lead

NEW YORK, March 24 (UPI) -- Money will be "no obstacle" for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's GOP presidential campaign, a hedge fund manager said ahead of a fundraising meeting.

"When the day is done and we're in the thick of a presidential race, money will not be an obstacle for Gov. Romney," Lewis Eisenberg, a KKR & Co. senior adviser told The Wall Street Journal.

Eisenberg is to attend a Thursday fundraising meeting at New York's Harvard Club with more than 90 donors -- many from Wall Street -- who will be asked to raise between $25,000 and $50,000 apiece for Romney within 90 days, the newspaper said.

The meeting is part of a quiet 15-city push to secure financial commitments from big-money "bundlers" in the hope of creating a fundraising network that would establish Romney, who has not announced his campaign plans, "as the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination for president," the Journal said.

New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, Manhattan real estate developer and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen M. Ross, and Emil Henry, a U.S. Treasury assistant secretary in the George W. Bush administration, are expected to attend the New York gathering.

Eisenberg was one of two finance chairman of the 2008 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The other was Washington lobbyist Wayne Berman, who is also with Romney, Politico and the Journal said. Berman was also a senior adviser to the 2000 and 2004 George W. Bush campaigns.

Johnson led the 2008 Republican National Convention fundraising effort and was with McCain that year.

Finance meetings, which included a session in Washington Tuesday, are scheduled for Los Angeles March 30, as well as in Detroit, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the plans.

Romney fundraisers are to have a final push in Las Vegas May 16 ahead of the first financial filing deadline, the Journal said.

That meeting will include a marathon phone-a-thon to get donations, a fundraiser involved in the plan said.

Romney's political action committee, Free & Strong America, did not immediately respond to a United Press International inquiry seeking comment on the meetings.

"By early summer, the world will know what we've done," a prominent fundraiser planning to attend the New York meeting told the Journal.

Romney, who lost to McCain for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, is widely considered the early 2012 front-runner, political observers and public opinion polls indicate. But his status is fragile, the Journal said, in part due to a Massachusetts healthcare-reform law Romney signed April 12, 2006, that is widely seen as a precursor to the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Republicans vow to overturn.

The Massachusetts law mandates nearly every state resident obtain at least a state-regulated minimum level of healthcare coverage, and it penalizes people who don't.

Officials of Obama's fledgling re-election campaign told about 450 donors this month to raise $350,000 each by year's end -- a total of more than $157 million that the Journal said, if reached, would position Obama for what many expect to be a billion-dollar re-election effort.