New York magazine just published a hefty piece by John Heilemann giving a behind-the-scenes look at the coming election from the point of view of the Obama campaign. The O-team is confident they'll win, we're told, and yet Heilemann conveys a real sense of foreboding campaign insiders seem to share on one issue: money.

[T]he unprecedented flood of dollars that is about to engulf the presidential race—and the near certainty that the majority of them will be spent by the Republicans—is what keeps [Campaign manager Jim] Messina and his brethren awake at night, gnawing at their fingernails like a pack of feral crystal addicts after a hellacious weeklong binge...

“The money is a huge problem,” confides a senior campaign maven. “We’ll see how long we can stand it. The money alone can’t beat us, but if we get bad jobs numbers a couple months in a row, then all of a sudden, things could get kinda hairy.”...

Although Obama is surely raising a boatload of dough, it appears his campaign (combined with the DNC) could fall short of its goal of $750 million. (Its April fund-raising total declined to $43.6 million from $53 million in March.) Meanwhile, the pro-Obama �super-PAC, Priorities USA Action, has raised less than $10 million since setting up shop more than a year ago—$2 million of it from Jeffrey Katzenberg—leading a highly placed Democrat involved in the reelection effort to describe it to me as a “fucking abysmal failure.”...

[I]n the end, the cumulative spending on the Democratic side will be about $1 billion, compared with maybe $1.6 billion on the Republican side...

“It concerns me gravely,” [Senior Adviser David] Plouffe tells me. “From a political standpoint, I’m almost as worried about that as I am about the question of what the economy’s gonna do over the next three or four months.”

 If the Obama team is nervous, it may be because they have no experience playing from behind. In 2008, Obama jettisoned his commitment to public financing and eventually raised $750 million over 21 months. That was more than triple the $238 million raised by his opponent John McCain.

And contrary to what the Obama team says now about beating the coming Romney ad blitz with their solid ground game, that's not how they fought in 2008. As the Post's Chris Cillizza reported in October of that year, the Obama team spent three times as much on TV ads as the McCain camp during the final weeks of the election. The DNC also had a 2:1 edge in ad dollars over the RNC in early October, though the spending was reportedly even the last two weeks before the election.

This is a team that's used to having a big money advantage to help coordinate their media. That's not going to be the case this time out. That's one reason, according to Heilemann, why "2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear."