The Obama re-election team is distancing the president from comments made by a key surrogate on Tuesday.

During a cable television interview Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, said "There's something about raping companies and leaving them in debt and setting up Swiss bank accounts and corporate businesses in the Grand Caymans. I have a serious problem with that."

The Obama campaign's response to Clyburn's comment was terse. "We strongly disagree with Congressman Clyburn's choice of words- they have no place in this conversation," said Obama Campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith.

However the Obama Camp isn't backing off the Bain Capital line of attack. Smith added, "But we do believe that Mitt Romney should come clean about his record as a corporate buyout specialist and how, contrary to his claims of creating jobs, his focus was on reaping quick profits for investors at the expense of workers and middle class families."

Private equity and Mitt Romney's time as the CEO of Bain Capital has been dominating the presidential campaign trail lately. On Monday President Obama defended attacks on Mr. Romney's time at Bain Capital, saying the subject "is not a distraction. This is part of the debate that we're going to be having this election campaign."

Both President Obama and Mitt Romney saw their fundraising numbers drop in recently. President Obama's re-election campaign raised $25.7 million in April, almost $10 million less than he raised in March.

Mitt Romney's team raised $11.7 million in April, down from more than $13 million in March.

However, President Obama has a staggering lead when it comes to cash on hand; Mr. Romney has $9.2 million while President Obama has $115 million.

Both of the Super PACs supporting the campaigns also had a lackluster April. Restore Our Future, which supports Mr. Romney raised $4.6 million for the month which is down from $8.7 million in March.

Meanwhile, the pro-Obama political action committee Priorities USA raised only $1.6 million in April.

Federal Election Commission records show that Newt Gingrich ended his presidential campaign with a little more than $800,000 in cash on hand and nearly $4.8 million in debt.

This city is on high alert after three terror arrests on the eve of the NATO summit, so average citizens are not supposed to get anywhere close to President Obama and the other visiting world leaders.

  That's why there are a string of humongous dump trucks lined up outside the president's hotel to deter potential suicide bombers, dozens of Chicago police officers stationed on the street to ward off people who are not supposed to be at the downtown Sheraton, and metal detectors in the lobby to check hotel guests who do belong but could be a threat.

  Sometimes, however, even the president simply wants to take an evening stroll -- and sends the Secret Service scrambling for a Plan B.

It was close to midnight on Saturday night when eyewitnesses say Obama simply left his safe and secure room upstairs and hopped on an elevator with his security detail to get a peek at the lobby. 

  Hotel guests and various tourists who were wandering the lobby in the highly unlikely event of bumping into the president let out shrieks and screams as the man himself suddenly walked off the elevator. He started shaking hands all around and even stopped to pose for  cell phone photos, including with one stunned guy who said he was celebrating a big day.

  "Happy Birthday!" called out the president, who was casual in rolled up shirtsleeves. (read more)

President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will remain at Camp David Saturday evening after the G8 Summit ends. While the other leaders will return home or head to Chicago for the NATO Summit, Obama and Merkel will hold a bilateral meeting the White House announced Saturday.

The G8 meeting was originally also scheduled in the president's home town of Chicago, but he moved the summit to the presidential retreat in order to create a more relaxed set of talks. And while many leaders have been taking walks around the camp grounds and having smaller casual discussions on patios, Chancellor Merkel and President Obama have more to discuss.

"Chancellor Merkel was one of the leaders that president Obama was able to talk to last night after the session," Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said Saturday, "he's also going to have a bilateral meeting with Chancellor Merkel after the conclusion of the G8. So the president will conclude the G8, he will have a statement to the press, and then he'll have a formal bilateral meeting actually here at Camp David with Chancellor Merkel." (read more)

When world leaders arrive at Camp David Friday evening to begin the G8 summit, they will add a new chapter to the history of the rural retreat that is an iconic part of the presidential past. The hideaway tucked into the Catoctin Mountains in western Maryland has never hosted a meeting of this magnitude.

"[T]he G8 meeting will be the largest gathering of leaders ever to stay at Camp David," National Security Director Tom Donilon said Thursday. "In fact, this is the first time that there will be more than two heads of state at Camp David."

The White House wants to make the gathering of leaders of some of the world's biggest economies an intimate affair. The leaders will meet around a dinner table in one of the camp's cabins and each will be provided accommodations for themselves and one aide.

Being the first to host the leaders in this type of setting is an idea the president liked as the decision was made to move the gathering from Chicago where some of the leaders will head Saturday night for a NATO summit. (read more)

One day following the endorsement from Former President George W. Bush, Mitt Romney slips him into his stump, but not by name and with no acknowledgment of his backing at an event today in St. Petersburg, FL.

Romney refers to President Obama's "predecessor" repeatedly, while slamming Obama for calling the $4 trillion dollar debt acquired during Bush's term "unpatriotic."

"I find it incomprehensible that a president could come to office and call his predecessor's record irresponsible and unpatriotic and then do almost nothing to fix it," Romney stated. "[Obama] said he would cut the debt in half if he became president. Instead he doubled it, alright, he doubled it," Romney exclaimed pointing to the huge 'debt clock' mounted behind him offering a real time calculation of the national debt registering over $15 trillion dollars.

"It's going to be 16 coming soon," Romney quipped.

Former President Bush's endorsement was tepid at best yesterday, uttering four words to an ABC reporter after delivering a speech on human rights in Washington, DC.

"I'm for Mitt Romney," Bush replied. The Former President's office was tight-lipped yesterday when asked for confirmation of the endorsement, responding to Fox News' inquiry with "Yessir, this is right." (read more)

The veteran behind a web video slamming President Obama for politicizing the takeout of Usama bin Laden says that, since the video's release, a number of Navy Seals have contacted him expressing "discontent" with the president's handling of the one-year anniversary of the raid.

Veterans for a Strong America is in the process of evaluating whether they will purchase ad time for the video, which has not yet aired on television.

"What we're doing is we are throwing the penalty flag on President Obama for excessive celebration," the chairman of conservative political action group, Joel Arends, told Fox News host Megyn Kelley in a live interview from South Dakota. "What you've seen from President Obama is he's not only spiked the football, he's signed it, he threw it up in the stands with the fans." (read more)

BOULDER, Colorado - President Obama is trying to jazz up college students and younger voters as he travels on a two-day battleground state swing where he'll push preventing a federal student loan rate hike.

A voting bloc that is notoriously unreliable, the president beat expectations of youth voters in 2008 and shared a large majority - two to one over rival Senator John McCain, R-Ariz - but is facing a harder sell to galvanize the youth vote this time.

Recent data shows the rough job market for recent grads at play and they may be less likely to actually show up and vote. A recent Fox News poll show that the president's favorability among voters under 30 has dropped 5 percent while his unfavorability has gone up 9 percent.

"In 2008 President Obama was a very unique candidate. He really captured the imagination of a lot of people who either had never been energized by politics or it had been a very long time before they had been excited about a candidate," said Nathan Gonzales of Rothenberg Political Report and Politicsinstereo.com founder.

[N]ow that he's an incumbent, he's had to make some decisions that aren't necessarily popular, and he's also responsible for the direction of the country, some of that shine has worn off with younger voters," Gonzales added.

The president is spending Tuesday and Wednesday in key political states he won last time, but still needs wins in - North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa. (read more)

Continuing his occasional tradition of making a big splash on the same day as a milestone in the Republican primary battle, President Obama is planning a major economic speech focused on tax fairness Tuesday.

That just so happens to be the same day GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney -- who has faced a barrage of attacks from Democrats and some Republicans about his wealth and relatively low tax rate -- will try to wrap up the race with a win in the Wisconsin primary.

At a lunch sponsored by the Associated Press in Washington, Obama will deliver what senior administration officials are billing as a major speech laying out what he sees as the important choices facing the country on the economy. 

The primary theme of the speech will be overall fairness in the tax code, which is shaping up to be the central focus of Obama's re-election effort. It's a message the president first previewed about everyone paying their "fair share" during a heavily-watched speech in Kansas late last year, followed by a call to action on the same issue in his January State of the Union Address. 

"Now, you can call this class warfare all you want," Obama said on Jan. 24. "But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense." (read more)

President Obama's speeches during his two-day, energy tour have so far not included the expression, "there's no silver bullet" -- his often-used phrase when talking about ways to lower gasoline prices and decrease U.S. dependency on foreign oil.

Amid criticism that the president does not appear to be doing enough to lower gas prices, the phrase did not appear in his remarks in Nevada or New Mexico and was not in his prepared remarks Thursday in Oklahoma at which time he announced he was approving the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The president has used the "silver bullet" phrase frequently over the past several weeks, including a stop last week in suburban Washington and during a weekly radio address earlier this month.

An administration official warned against overreading the text because the president still says there's no "quick fix” to deal with the problem. But a check of the Nevada and New Mexico remarks shows that phrase was not used.

The change in rhetoric -- in which "there’s no silver bullet" doesn’t quite fit the "I'm doing all-of-the-above" -- suggests the administration is still trying to calibrate what will work.