Haim Saban still hadn’t decided whether or not to help Senator Barack Obama get elected president when he picked up the phone this summer and began planning an imaginary event.

The Hollywood billionaire—America’s top political-campaign contributor—was still heartbroken over Senator Hillary Clinton’s defeat. As one of her national finance chairs, he had single-handedly raised more than $1 million from his friends and associates, and her departure from the race had left him so bereft that he considered backing John McCain. When that idea met with opposition from Saban’s wife, Cheryl, and their four children (“Are you kidding? We pounced on him,” she recalled), the self-described “cartoon schlepper” (he made his first millions in kiddie TV) was left with two options. (View slideshow.)

“Option No. 1 is to vote for Obama, send him a $2,300 check, and sayonara—hope he wins,” Saban said, citing the maximum donation allowed by an individual. “Option No. 2 is, Go big. If I’m going to go big, I have to go biggest. I have zero interest in being big. Biggest, I have an interest.”

Nattily dressed in a blue blazer with gold buttons and a white open-collared shirt, the 63-year-old grandfather was sitting at the head of a gleaming table in the 26th-floor conference room of Saban Capital Group, the firm he founded in 2001 to manage his own $3.4 billion fortune. Running Saban Capital isn’t his only job; he also owns several music-publishing companies and serves as chairman of Univision Communications, the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States, which he and a group of private equity partners took over in 2007.

An assistant buzzed on the phone. Saban had asked her to call his friend, the record producer David Foster, who was now holding.

“He’s going to yell at me,” Saban predicted, before picking up and yelling first: “Bubbe!” Then he got to the point: If he decided to “go big” for Obama, he wanted Foster to help him plan a fundraiser to eclipse all fundraisers, an event Saban was already calling “the concert of the year.”

“I want to do something huge. I want Lionel Richie. I want Shakira. Of course we’ll have Oprah. We’ll have all that,” he barked into the phone, describing what he imagined as a mid-September, $25,000-a-ticket event to be thrown in his “backyard”—the lush grounds, modeled on the gardens of Versailles, of his six-acre Beverly Hills estate. Foster said something that made Saban laugh. “No, I’m not working too hard. I’m enjoying myself!” he said, running a hand over his mane of thick black hair, which appeared to be held in place with shellac. “Are you in?”

Foster was in. But was Saban? “It depends first of all that I commit to myself that this is what I want to do,” he told me after the call. “And I haven’t yet.”

Rainmakers like Haim Saban have always played a key role in politics. But this summer, when Senator Obama became the first major-party candidate to decline public financing since the system was created in 1976, über-fundraisers became even more essential.

That made Saban’s indecision newsworthy. In late June, Obama—girding himself for a tough battle with McCain—began wooing Senator Clinton’s top fundraisers in earnest. Clinton helped, asking more than 100 of her most persuasive money gatherers to meet Obama at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Most agreed to come, but some, including Saban, “pointedly rejected the request,” reported the British weekly the Observer.  

A few days earlier, John B. Emerson, a former White House official under Bill Clinton and a major supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, helped organize a $28,500-a-couple event in Los Angeles that raised $5 million for Obama (much of it from those in the entertainment industry). Saban did not attend; soon, Daily Variety had singled him out as a “fervent” Hillraiser who had yet to endorse a candidate.