In fact, Obama himself has even thrown out this whopper:

President Barack Obama answered questions on this topic in an interview with CNBC's John Harwood on April 21, 2010.

"In the 2008 campaign, you got a lot of money, about $1 million from employees of Goldman Sachs," Harwood said. "Your former White House counsel Greg Craig is apparently going to represent Goldman Sachs. In light of this case, do either of those things embarrass you?"

"No," Obama said. "First of all, I got a lot of money from a lot of people. And the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country. And moreover, anybody who gave me money during the course of my campaign knew that I was on record again in 2007, and 2008, pushing very strongly that we needed to reform how Wall Street did business. And so, nobody should be surprised in the position that I'm taking now because it is one that I was very clear about in the course of the campaign."

What jumped out at us in this exchange was Obama's statement, "the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country." We've seen that statement repeated elsewhere, but the evidence doesn't back it up.

While he did get "more [small donations] than any presidential candidate"  in 2008 during the primary, in total he only got about 34% of his general election funds from people who donated less than $200. During 2007, however, he received 60% of his money from those making donations of $1000 or more (28% of the total).

The key is to look at those donors who gave multiple "small" donations:

An analysis by the Campaign Finance Institute of the 405,000 individuals who donated at least an aggregate of $200 or more by August 31 (and thus had their names disclosed in filings with the Federal Election Commission) revealed that at least 212,000 were repeat donors who began by making an undisclosed small contribution of less than $200. About 93,000 of these repeat donors gave a total of $400 or less; 106,000 gave more than $400 but less than $1,000; and 13,000 gave $1,000 or more. These repeat donors ended up giving about $100 million to the campaign.

Thus, another way of assessing Obama's fundraising is on the basis of the aggregate amount given by individual donors instead of on the basis of the separate donations made by individuals. Such an analysis provides a clearer depiction of the role of small donors, defined here as those who gave no more than $200 in aggregate during the course of the campaign. This information is provided in Table 1 (see page 16).