You send the money, we'll keep the candidate

Using a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about "the fierce urgency of now," Michelle Obama has joined the effort to raise $850,000 on the Internet this week for her husband's campaign, hoping to limit the amount of time he spends fund-raising.

"There's nothing Barack dislikes more about campaigning than asking people for money," she wrote in an email to supporters today. "Unfortunately, over the next few weeks, he's scheduled to travel all over the country on a series of fundraising trips. You can get him back to doing what he does best."

It's sort of like that oft-used National Public Radio fund-raising trick, where stations promise to limit the monotonous fund drives if listeners open their wallets right away. Except in this case, it's Obama, not the customer, who is spared the monotony. Which raises a question: If Obama raises enough dough to skip a finance event or two, won't his supporters who counted on seeing him be upset if he doesn't show?