Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are in the midst of a fundraising binge, and it appears there is nowhere the two White House hopefuls won't go in search of dough.
Next week, the Obama campaign will hold two fundraising events in China.
The candidate himself won't be making an appearance. Instead, guests at the Bejing home of David Brooks, a Coca Cola executive there, will hear from two senior foreign policy fellows from the Brookings Institution who advise the Obama campaign, Ivo Daalder and Phil Gordon. If the June 17 appearance does not satisfy, American expatriates in China can hear the two foreign policy experts opine at an event on June 19 in Shanghai hosted by Ted Hornbein, an executive a Richco, a company that manufactures electronic components for cell phones and the like.
No rules prohibit fundraising abroad, so long as the donors are American citizens. And a number of the 2008 presidential contenders engaged in overseas fundraising during the past 16 months. McCain, for instance, held a March 20 luncheon at Spencer House -- the neo-classical home built for an ancestor of Diana, the late Princess of Wales -- "by kind permission of Lord Rothschild OM GBE and the Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild."
But Obama appears to have collected the most funds from overseas, at least $1.6 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. (McCain raised $196,000 from donors living abroad, the records show.) While McCain's contributions are centered largely in London, with a handful from Bermuda, the Obama funds have come from addresses as eclectic as Kabul, Dubai, Palermo, and Sydney. 
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