Much Ado About Funding

It seems like all people can talk about these days is dollars. Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Watts are all in the national news.

First is all the news about Obama and Clinton raising the kind of mad dollars they did. You can expect to see this all week. The quarter just ended, and this is a fresh, quantifiable measure of how the campaigns are doing. George will emphatically remind me that he forecast that Obama would get his $30 million, and I will say this much money may hurt Obama. Now, Clinton more or less has to spend a significant amount of her dollars beating up on Obama, as a response to his fundraising prowess. That was going to happen anyways, but now it has to happen, and soon.

On the heels of news that McCain is firing some 50 staffers comes the reason why: he only raised $11.2 million in the second quarter. I know, I know. The numbers seem ridiculous to me too, at times. But in the world we live in now, $11.2 million doesn't keep you in front-runner status for long.

Also, Congressional Quarterly caught on to an interesting detail in Mikal Watts' candidacy paperwork this morning, noting that he's committed almost ten million dollars of his own money total to the whole shebang. George pointed out to me that the filing shows this has been out there since he declared back in early June, but most places failed to mention it. I may have missed if someone else has already brought it up, but there it is. The $3.8 million figure cited before is for the primary race, and the rest (and by rest I mean $6.2 million) would be for the general.

I will be interested to see how much money he raised in June. At the end of this fresh quarter we'll probably have some face-to-face primary money comparisons to talk about. BOR's Todd Hill has it that Rick Noriega announced that he'd be filing his exploratory committee paperwork this week.