Obama and Romney were both coming off a week of intensive national fundraising.

Without Democratic primary opposition, Obama had a huge early advantage.

But Romney, likely to surpass the 1,144 delegates needed for the GOP nomination next Tuesday with a primary win in Texas, is starting to catch up as major conservative donors begin opening their wallets.

Through April, Obama and Democratic groups supporting him have raised nearly $450 million and have more than $150 million in the bank. Romney and Republicans backing him have collected more than $400 million during the same stretch and have about $80 million at their disposal.

Both candidates are shooting for raising around $800 million, which would put their combined campaign spending at roughly $1.6 billion. Add another few hundred million from super PACs and convention spending.

Obama opted out of public financing in 2008 and raised $750 million. His spending swamped GOP rival Sen. John McCain, limited to spend the $84 million he received from taxpayers. Super PACs didn’t exist then.

We know what happened in that race. Romney didn’t want to see it happen to him.

Neither candidate had public appearances Friday. Romney was taking a long weekend California hiatus from campaigning, while Obama planned several ceremonial events on Memorial Day.

Throughout the president’s first term, his most ardent supporters have reacted to those of us pushing him to do – and say – more on such issues with frustration and anger, some of it nasty and personal, some of it thoughtful and well-argued. They rightly blame Congress for blocking action on key progressive priorities, but strangely downplay the power of presidential leadership. Late last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait twice attacked liberal Obama critics for being “unreasonable” about what the president alone could accomplish, because “liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president.”

Chait took particular aim at lefty image guru Drew Westen, a one-time Obama admirer who criticized the president in the New York Times not merely for what he hadn’t accomplished, but for failing to tell a compelling story. Chait accused Westen and other progressives of embracing:

…a model of American politics in which the president in not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

Chait caricatured Westen’s argument (and the beliefs of those who agreed with it), but he got lots of love for both pieces in the pro-Obama blogosphere, where folks finally felt they had a real diagnosis for the illness of those they dismissed as “emoprogs.” But now that we see the changes wrought by Obama’s politically risky embrace of gay marriage, maybe it will be easier for folks to understand that it’s the job of political advocates not merely to praise, but to push their leaders forward.

Steve Kornacki runs down the astonishing political changes we’ve seen in the mere two weeks since the president carefully announced his supposed change of heart on gay marriage. The nation’s largest African-American organization, the NAACP, has come out behind it – and maybe most important, recognized it as an important civil rights issue. Maybe most dramatic, in Maryland, African-American voters have now flipped to support the state’s gay marriage ballot measure 55 to 36 percent –almost the exact percentage by which they opposed it in previous polling on the state issue. And in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, African-Americans’ support for gay marriage jumped to 59 percent from 41 percent in the wake of the president’s historic announcement.

Now, I’m not going to argue that Obama’s turnaround alone caused this sea change. The arc of the moral universe has been bending toward justice on gay rights for a long time, and as I wrote last week, the president gave it an additional tug. There have been advocates within the NAACP working to make this happen for a long time, and they deserve a lot of credit. African-American voter opinion had already been trending in this direction, even if black voters had been less receptive to gay marriage than other demographic groups. There is also an emotional and personal component to the president’s stance that makes his moral suasion hard to replicate on behalf of, say, the jobs bill or the public option. (And let’s also remember it’s white voters who are most hostile on some of those economic issues, thanks to the divide and conquer politics of the GOP over the last 40 years.)

Still, it’s hard not to conclude that Obama’s words made a significant difference in the political course of this debate. Ironically, it was once critics of Obama who mocked the power of words, and specifically the candidate’s own oratorical gifts. Obama shot back at them many times.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he told Wisconsin Democrats in February 2008. “‘I have a dream’ — just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words. Just speeches.” At many times over the last three years, I’ve been amazed at how Obama’s critics and supporters seemed to change sides on the question of the power of his words.

I give the folks who call themselves “prag progs” – pragmatic progressives, as opposed to “unreasonable” emoprogs – a lot of credit for fixing attention on what the president has accomplished, and reminding others not merely to fixate on what he hasn’t. But I think it’s time that all of us acknowledge that there’s a role for constructive pressure, too. Progressive change has always required impatient agitators – and it will continue to.

But on a conference call this morning, campaign officials said the website, called “Obama Pride,” is as much about touting the president’s advances on LGBT rights as it is a means to organize and engage with the LGBT community. “We will run robust LGBT Vote programming to turn out LGBT voters this November,” said National LGBT vote director Jamie Citron.

The five-minute video also features new interview-style footage of Obama, who explains how his view on marriage has changed over time and notes that “we’ve seen a profound cultural shift just over the past decade,”

Indeed, the roll out — timed to coincide with Harvey Milk Day — comes as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds opposition to gay marriage at all time low in the wake of Obama’s announcement.

That puts Obama on the right side of history, the campaign said. “[Mitt] Romney’s position on same-sex marriage is also historic but not in the way it should be,” said Obama co-chair Joe Solmonese, the outgoing president of the LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Coalition, who noted that Romney has pledged to push for an anti-marriage equality amendment.

While the marriage reversal carries major political risks, the aggressive PR effort from the deliberate Obama campaign suggests they feel confident that Obama’s stance on gay rights will be a net gain, politically. Already, fundraising is reportedly up as both disillusioned gay Democrats and even some gay Republicans are coming back into the fold. Indeed, the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, Rich Tafel, told NPR last weekend that he’s considering defecting to Obama in light of the announcement. If the campaign and Jane Lynch have their way, he won’t be the last.

But if you measure the power of a lie by its utter truthlessness combined with the breadth of its reach, the notion that Obama has presided over a wild federal spending spree is probably the biggest whopper spread by the GOP, with the help of the right-wing noise machine and lazy mainstream media. Mitt Romney regularly rails against the “debt and spending inferno” the president supposedly ignited. Last month on Fox, Charles Krauthammer called Obama’s spending “radical, unprecedented,” and CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller reported that the “National debt has increased more under Obama than under Bush.”

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch debunked all of those claims: “Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s,” writes Rex Nutting. “Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.” In his first term, Obama will have increased spending by 1.4 percent; in his last three years, George W. Bush increased annual spending by an average of 8.1 percent – and in Bush’s last fiscal year, 2009, spending jumped 17.9 percent. Republican deity Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term. Nutting continues:

After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4 percent annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.

In per capita terms, real spending will drop by nearly 5 percent from $11,450 per person in 2009 to $10,900 in 2013 (measured in 2009 dollars).

Strangely, Marketwatch frames Nutting’s article as “commentary,” I guess because he’s an opinion columnist, but his facts and figures come straight from the non-partisan Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office. The charts he uses are vivid and leave no room for doubt: When the president says he’s dropped spending to its lowest levels since the Eisenhower presidency – back before the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Water Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, or the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Education — he’s telling the truth.

Mild-mannered White House press secretary Jay Carney was nearly moved to swearing on Wednesday, pointing to the facts outlined by Nutting and telling reporters “don’t buy into GOP B.S.” (That became a leading Politico headline later in the day.) But will the media heed Carney’s warning?

We’ll see. Somehow I doubt it. I discussed where the “big spender” lie fits into the pantheon of GOP falsehoods on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with David Corn:

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Dear Bewildered,

Your friend’s problem is that he is a racist.

It’s not nice to label people. A racist may be an excellent builder of miniature racing-car models. He may be a good whistler.

But he’s still a racist. Being a racist is stupid and repugnant. What’s worse, it can spread. It’s each person’s job to not be a racist.

He can stop being a racist. You can help. You can tell him that while he may have certain racist thoughts, he can stop being a racist by not voicing any of these thoughts ever under any circumstances.

Maybe that would lead to some positive personal change. Or maybe he would give you a hurt, bewildered look of confusion and self-pity that makes you want to punch him.

Don’t punch him. That won’t help.

Well, it might help a little. It might temporarily curb his outward expressions of racism. But I’m against hitting people even as a gift of enlightenment.

Just tell him that being a racist is not cool anywhere in the United States of America or in Europe or Asia or Africa or North America or South America or Australia or Antarctica. which pretty much means the whole world, all the continents, plus the open oceans and in outer space also. Racism is not cool even in outer space or on other planets. It’s not cool, period. It’s not cool anywhere, not in public or in private. It’s one of those things that you just want to get rid of completely and be done with.

Tell your friend that the next time he says some kind of racist remark like that, that you’re terminating all contact with him.

Now, everyone has a shadow self that embodies the repressed. We all have our share of unvoiced hatred and fear, irrational beliefs, strange, criminal impulses. Thoughts come into our heads that we must censor because to voice them would disturb others.

We may have sexual fantasies about our friends’ wives or husbands, or their sisters or brothers or their children; we might have taboo curiosities. We may find ourselves imagining elaborate ways to connect physically that involve hydraulics, servo motors, pulleys and latex.

Some of us have so many of these thoughts that we move to San Francisco.

But let’s not complicate the issue.

Also, there are rumored to exist tiny protected intellectual zones where people have advanced degrees in things you never heard of and special vocabularies come into use in a specialized context, where you can say things that have several layers and degrees of irony and are understood in sophisticated ways that you couldn’t explain to your friend even if you understood them yourself, which you’re not going to.

That’s different.

There is also weird humor which unless you’re Sarah Silverman, don’t try that either. It’s too advanced for you.

And don’t get on your high horse and pretend there are degrees, that racism exists on a continuum. There are no degrees. There is no continuum.

Racism is bad. It’s evil. Nobody should be voicing racist thoughts.

If your friend keeps it up, just totally, radically de-friend him. Become his special not-friend.

Be done with it. It’s that simple.