Obama Crushes Money Expectations

by shamanic

Oh. My. God. Barack Obama just announced that his campaign raised more than $25 million for the first quarter, an absolutely unheard of amount for a new candidate, and a figure that in many ways crushes even Hillary Clinton's fundraising machine. Okay, in truth, the numbers we're seeing this cycle are unheard of, period. But check out some of these stats:

Obama (D-Ill.) appears to have surpassed Clinton in several ways: He raised $6.9 million through donations over the Internet, more than the $4.2 million than Clinton (N.Y.) raised online. He reported donations from 100,000 people, double the 50,000 people who gave to Clinton.

And of Obama's overall receipts, $23.5 million is eligible for use in the primary contests. Clinton officials have declined to disclose how much of her cash is available for the primaries -- rather than designated for the general election and therefore blocked off unless she wins the nomination -- raising suspicions that she raised less for the primaries than Obama did.

If there was any question about whether Obama is a serious contender, it should now be put to bed.

So that's the horse race, but let's look at the totals reported by the candidates and take a moment to consider whether this is healthy for democracy.

Democratic Candidate	Q1 Amount	Republican Candidate	Q1 Amount
Hillary Clinton	$26M	Mitt Romney	$23M
Barack Obama	$25M	Rudy Giuliani	$15M
John Edwards	$14M	John McCain	$12M
Bill Richardson	$6M	Sam Brownback	$.5M
Chris Dodd	$4M	Mike Huckabee	$.5M
Joe Biden	$3M
Dem Totals:	$78M	GOP Totals:	$51M

This leaves out a bunch of smaller candidates and those who are waiting in the wings, so we're easily looking at a Q1 haul of nearly $150M between the candidates (I didn't include Clinton's $10M loan to herself in the figures above). We're eleven months away from the Iowa caucuses and that's the kind of slush that's sloshing.

This is likely to be one of the ugliest primaries ever, on both sides. The shortened primary calendar means that attack ads will be running wall-to-wall across whole swaths of the country from January to April and beyond. I hope that the fight shown by the hundreds of political bloggers who specialize in these things will continue to propel the media to do a better job of fact-checking negative ads, but I suspect the sheer volume of mud being flung will simply soil everyone.

You simply cannot arm a crop of candidates with this much money and not see it turn into mortal combat. It's gonna be an ugly one, but I also can't dispute the quality of candidates we're evaluating, especially on the Democratic side. Even Hillary, my least favorite Dem contender, would be a highly proficient and groundbreaking (while still somehow uninspiring) choice.

So that's your round-up. How did your candidate do in the money primary, and what are your takeaways from this week's political cash flow figures?