Fund-Raising Trip Takes Obama Along West Coast Protesters in Orange County, Calif., during President Obama's visit there. Republicans criticized the president for combining campaign stops with official events. SAN FRANCISCO - If there were any doubts that President Obama had plunged fully into his re-election campaign, they were erased on Thursday as the president spent an entire day hopscotching some of California's fanciest neighborhoods in search of dollars to finance his bid for a second term. In political circles a fund-raising trip of this magnitude is called a "money run," and advisers say that by the time the last wineglasses will be clinked - on Friday, at a fund-raiser at the Westin in Bellevue, Wash. - Team Obama will have raised around $8 million. While Mr. Obama is mixing in a couple of public stops - he visited a manufacturing company in Milwaukee on Wednesday and will stop at a Boeing plant on Friday - the mostly political nature of his trip produced Republican grousing that Mr. Obama was doing "what he does best," in the words of the Republican National Committee's spokeswoman, Kirsten Kukowski: "Campaign in Hollywood with the rich and famous who will open their pocketbooks for his campaign coffers." The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, shrugged off the Republican criticism, saying, "We're consolidating a lot of events out here because he's here, and then there will be periods of relatively few political events, and then more concentration, depending on what's on the schedule." As to the criticism that taxpayers are paying for part of what is a fund-raising trip because the campaign stops are combined with official events, Mr. Obama's advisers noted that has long been the case during presidential re-election seasons. "We do it absolutely by the book and in the same manner that President Bush did and President Clinton did," Mr. Carney told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One. Mr. Obama is trying to use the lengthy Republican presidential nomination fight to shore up Democratic financing for the election year. Just two weeks ago, the Obama campaign, in a turnaround, began officially encouraging supporters to donate to a Democratic "super PAC," Priorities USA. Obama campaign officials characterized their decision as a necessary one meant to combat similar Republican political action committees, particularly those set up to back Mitt Romney. At the various events on Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Obama mostly stuck to the same script, telling supporters at one fund-raiser, co-hosted by the actor Will Ferrell: "Part of our job is to say, as tough as it is, as incremental as it sometimes seems, things have changed. And they can change more if we fight for it, if we're determined, if we have confidence in each other, if we decide to unite instead of divide. Mr. Obama referred to signs of an uptick in the economy, including jobs growth and a revival of the auto industry after the bailout that he backed. And because this was, after all, a group as solidly Democrat as any the president is likely to encounter, he even talked about the health care bill he pushed to passage. Mr. Obama's arrival on Thursday in San Francisco coincided with his campaign's announcement that it had opened its first office dedicated solely to high-tech work in the race, like setting up Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and other Internet applications. Campaign aides called it a "technology field office," and said they believed it to be a first for a presidential campaign. Katie Hogan, deputy press secretary with the Obama campaign, said that one of the office's missions would be to serve as a place for Web-savvy volunteers to come with ideas about how to increase the campaign's reach through the use of the Internet.