Well, the campaign needed some good news after their debate debacle, right?  Their fundraising broke records for a September in an election cycle, far surpassing their previous moth’s total:

President Obama’s reelection campaign raised $181 million in September, far eclipsing the amounts raised in any month of 2012 and coming close to the record $193 million that he and Democrats raised four years earlier. …

The September haul caps a turnaround in Obama’s financial status since the summer, when he fell behind his Republican opponent in monthly fundraising from May to July. The Obama team edged out Romney in August, $114 million to $112 million. The Obama campaign has raised a much larger proportion of its money from small-dollar donors than Romney’s, and it said earlier this week that it had eclipsed 10 million individual donations this year.

Reuters has more on those numbers:

A vast majority of the donations – 98 percent – were $250 or less. The average contribution was $53.

Obama’s campaign is proud of its base of low-dollar donors, believing that gives the president an advantage, especially at the end of the election cycle when supporters can keep giving even if they have donated before.

We haven’t heard yet from Team Romney, at least not about September.  The Post’s Dan Eggen notes that the Romney campaign and RNC have told the media that donations have zoomed upward since Mitt Romney’s convincing win over Barack Obama on Wednesday night.  We also don’t know yet about the burn rate for Team Obama’s numbers — how much it cost them to raise that $181 million — but whatever the burn rate, this is a very impressive number.

But here’s the puzzler about this report: why announce it on a Saturday morning, when few people are paying attention?  Why not do it Friday afternoon and win the last significant news cycle, or on Monday morning to dominate the week?  It looks as if Team Obama was pretty desperate for a narrative changer — and couldn’t get their act together quickly enough to launch it most effectively.

Update: Some are wondering whether the odd Saturday morning release might have something to do with a donor-scandal story that may pop in the next few days.  We’ll keep an eye on that.