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President Obama's campaign manager worried aloud in a video message released Thursday that too many potential donors are reluctant to contribute to the president's re-election effort because they believe he's running a $1 billion campaign. That figure, Jim Messina insisted, is "completely untrue," and he urged supporters to give now and keep donating through 2012.

The campaign has consistently shot down that projection, which was inspired by Obama’s 2008 success raising a record total of more than $750 million. This year, talk of the president’s billion-dollar campaign “machine” has become a club used by GOP presidential challengers to blast Obama and try to stir conservatives to back their bids to defeat him.

Despite the Chicago campaign’s denials, analysts have suggested Obama’s team and the Democratic National Committee could achieve that eye-popping $1 billion war chest with the inclusion of support from organized labor, super PAC money, and backing from other independent groups.

Messina announced that Obama’s campaign raised $42 million for the president’s re-election efforts and $24 million for the Democratic National Committee, for a total of $68 million in the final quarter of 2011. For the year, the campaign raised more than $200 million, and has projected that it could vastly exceed that haul this year as the contest heats up and the electorate engages with the race.

Contributor complacency, however, appeared to be a worry in Chicago as 2011 came to a close and Obama touted himself as something of an underdog in a race against well-funded Republican contenders. “Too many Obama supporters think we don’t need their money, or they don’t need to give now,” Messina said in his message. “In fact, in the past week, I’ve gotten e-mails that said . . . ‘You’re going to raise a billion dollars. Why do you need my money?’ ”

He lamented that “some people think we have a magic formula to win this campaign,” but that belief, he warned, could be the Democrats’ undoing. “When we get an opponent, we’ll be facing their fundraising operation as well as all the outside groups that have already started spending money for them. What we have is grassroots,” he said.

The campaign believes it will face Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee, and has already seen that the nominee will be backed by cash-rich GOP super PACs and financing from corporations and special interests. Romney’s campaign announced this week that it raised $24 million in the final months of 2011, for a total of $56 million since he announced his candidacy in June.

Messina’s video message, distributed by email and posted on the campaign website, employed sophisticated technology to automatically fill in identifying information about recipients (name, home Zip code, personal email address, and home phone number) on an electronic “contributor” form, with spaces for the recipient to then fill in credit card information and a dollar amount. Use of such electronic data-matches to keep tabs on individuals and their personal information is one of the expensive investments the campaign has made this cycle, believing it offers the president an edge heading toward November.

A total of 1.3 million 2011 donations -- and the accompanying information about the contributors -- are now in that Obama database. And 98 percent of the donations have been in increments of $250 or less, Messina said. The campaign is eager to suggest that Obama’s financial backing comes primarily from small-dollar donations and common folk, but as in 2008, the bulk of the president’s war chest for this race is coming from big donors. In the final quarter of 2011, 583,000 people contributed, including 200,000 supporters who gave to Obama’s campaign for the first time, Messina said.