Obama Balancing Donors in Hollywood and Silicon Valley WASHINGTON - Election years always bring with them tough balancing efforts for presidential candidates trying to stay on the good side of powerful constituencies. But few can come close to the high-wire act that President Obama must perform in the next two days as he seeks to soothe Hollywood, that longtime bastion of fund-raising dollars for Democrats, while not alienating the high-tech industry that has itself surged to the top of the Obama money list. First, the soothing. Mr. Obama is flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday to attend three fund-raisers, including one hosted by the actor Will Ferrell and Bradley Bell, a soap opera executive ("The Bold and the Beautiful"). The Foo Fighters will be on hand to perform; expect to see a number of other glitterati. Problem: Mr. Obama is in the doghouse with the show-business people, who are mad because the White House didn't support them on the antipiracy bill that got squashed in Congress in January after Google and other Internet high fliers descended on Washington to pressure the White House and Congress to oppose it in a standoff that left Hollywood reeling. But the president has also come to rely on cash from Hollywood, which contributed $9.2 million to his 2008 campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Christopher J. Dodd, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, created a stir - and ruffled White House feathers - just after the drubbing last month when he threatened to turn off the spigot, saying in an interview with Fox News: "Those who count on quote Hollywood for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them." The White House acknowledged privately that his comment was not received warmly. But, as if to prove Mr. Dodd's point, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that money for Mr. Obama from Hollywood was down last year, coming in at just $1.2 million, compared with $2.8 million during the same period in 2008. White House officials have been doing some stroking of Hollywood to prevent a further erosion; Mr. Obama began the effort during his State of the Union speech last month when he threw the motion picture association a bone, promising to work to protect intellectual property in China. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. picked up the effort on Tuesday, using a lunchtime toast at the State Department with China's vice president, Xi Jinping, to further raise the intellectual property protection issue - giving his boss the perfect entrée to say at Mr. Ferrell's fund-raiser that the White House is fighting hard for Hollywood. But at the same time, administration officials say they don't plan to reverse their position that major elements of the piracy legislation sought by Hollywood go too far. On that battle, Google and the techies, so far, have been the clear-cut winner, and they will be able to thank Mr. Obama on Thursday when he heads to San Francisco for Part 2 of his balancing act: he is headlining a fund-raiser at the home of Nicola Miner, daughter of the Oracle co-founder Robert Miner. And there, Mr. Obama must assure well-heeled attendees that he will take the interests of the new economy to heart. And the high-tech industry at the heart of that new economy has surpassed Hollywood in fund-raising muscle, not to mention overall contribution to the national economy. In many ways, the fight puts Mr. Obama in a script that could be conceived only in Hollywood. An online piracy bill backed by the big studios was chugging along until it ran into a firestorm in January when Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts. The White House had a few days earlier released a statement that some parts of the bill went too far, adding wind to the Web storm. By the time the dust cleared, lawmakers had backed off, and the old guard in Hollywood was fuming. "It's the Rebellion versus the Empire," said Donnie Fowler, a Democratic consultant who was Al Gore's national field director in the 2000 campaign, with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as Luke Skywalker and Mr. Dodd as Darth Vader. "The problem for Hollywood here," Mr. Fowler said, "is that they contribute only about 1/10th as much to the national economy" as technology. Plus their stars and starlets can't match up against hundreds of thousands of netizens who go nuts when their Wikipedia and Google go dark for a day. Despite Mr. Dodd's comments about payback, some political observers note that at the end of the day, it is unlikely that Hollywood will suddenly turn to the Republicans. "I think this is yet another large industry that has been a consistent supporter of Obama, that has to handle some disappointment from time to time," said Matt Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a Democratic policy institute. They'll swallow hard and contribute. But they may not contribute quite so much. Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Dodd's spokeswoman, did offer up a clarification of his remarks. Mr. Dodd, she said, "was making the obvious point that people tend to support politicians whose views tend to match their own." Mr. Dodd himself has since been more circumspect. "We hope the president will use this opportunity in both communities," he said in an e-mailed statement, "to reiterate the important point that he made in the State of the Union: that online content theft is a problem, that it harms U.S. workers and U.S. business and that now is the time to come together to find meaningful solutions to protect American intellectual property from foreign criminals." He added that Hollywood and the tech industry "need each other to succeed and grow."