Earlier this month, actor George Clooney hosted a fundraising dinner for 150 people at his Los Angeles home at which Obama was the guest of honour and celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck prepared the meal. Almost $15-million was raised, which was a record for a single fundraiser.

Among Hollywood A-listers like Barbra Streisand, Salma Hayek, Jack Black, Robert Downey jnr and Tobey Maguire who broke bread with Obama were two women who had won a raffle in which small donors had donated as little as $3 to enter. The rest of the guests paid $40000 to attend.

Obama's team are now offering dinner with the president and former president Bill Clinton, and another dinner with actress Sarah Jessica Parker. That's hard to resist, right?

Not to be outdone, the Romney campaign this week announced that supporters could win a dinner with the presidential hopeful and businessman and reality-TV star Donald Trump on June 28 in New York.

The package sounds interesting: you and your plus-one get flown to New York City in the "Trump vehicle", which, I assume, is his private jet; stay at Trump International Hotel & Tower New York; enjoy a tour of the Celebrity Apprentice boardroom; and then dine with The Donald and Mitt.

On Thursday, after the dinner raffle was announced and Trump gushed about how honoured he was that the Romney campaign wanted to do this with him, he jumped into questioning if Obama was indeed born in the US.

"Look, it's very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his (Obama's) written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital," he said.

Someone who worked for the literary agency said she was mistaken when she wrote that Obama was born in Kenya. But Trump insists that was all a lie. "That's what he told the literary agent. That's the way life works ... He didn't know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said ... He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia ... Now they're saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her, she said, 'Oh, I mean Hawaii.' Give me a break."

Romney once said he liked firing people. Maybe when the dinner is over, instead of saying good night, he and Trump will point at their guests and say, "You're fired."