Campaign Finance

Her campaign is massive debt:

Barack Obama began the month of April with a 5-1 cash advantage over a debt-saddled Hillary Rodham Clinton, setting the stage for his lopsided spending in the crucial primary state of Pennsylvania.

Financial reports filed Sunday by the Democratic presidential candidates with the Federal Election Commission show Clinton had $10.3 million in debts at the start of the month and only about $9 million cash on hand for the primaries. Obama reported having $42 million for the primary.

(emphasis added)

So how viable will she be against John McCain in the general if she is already this far in the red? Obama has proven his ability to raise record amounts of money. Going against the right wing noise machine, it takes money to be louder. Obama can afford to be the loudest candidate in the general.

Another great month for Obama, and it looks like it might be more than double what Clinton did. Guess the whole momentum thing is moot now.

That is how much Barack Obama raised in February. With Hillary's $35 million, that makes a one month total of $90 million.

It hasn't even been a year since their last major breech of security involving personal information for our veterans and we get another one:

The Department of Veterans Affairs began notifying 1.8 million veterans and doctors Monday that their personal and business information could be on a portable hard drive that has been missing from an Alabama hospital for nearly three weeks.

The hard drive may have contained Social Security numbers and other personal information from about 535,000 individuals and billing information on 1.3 million doctors nationwide, the VA said. That's more than 37 times more people than authorities initially believed were affected.

An employee at the VA medical center in Birmingham reported the external hard drive missing on Jan. 22. The drive was used to back up information on the employee's office computer. It may have contained data from research projects, the department said.

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis questioned why it took the agency so long to begin sending out notification letters.

One of this biggest factors for the past decade of GOP wins has been their fundraising and GOTV (get out the vote) campaign, which I will have more on later. These two factors combined have dealt lethal blows to the Democrats and the Democrats have not been able to counter them, until now.

This year has been a fundraising landslide for Democrats. More big time businesses are donating to the Democrats and they have been catching up to the Republican fundraising machine. Today's Washington Post even talks about the sudden "surge" in Democrat fundraising:

Democratic fundraising for the midterm elections is ending with a surge.

In September, the Democratic campaign committees for the House and the Senate outraised their counterpart Republican committees, reversing historical trends.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised $14.4 million and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee collected $13.6 million last month, they said. In contrast, the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $12 million and the National Republican Senatorial Committee collected $5.2 million.

The Republican National Committee, however, continued to outpace the Democratic National Committee. In September, the RNC raised $13.1 million and reported total receipts of $14.3 million, while the DNC said it collected $5.6 million.

The GOP committees maintained an overall advantage of about $10 million in funds available to be spent. At the end of September, the Democratic committees had $67.3 million on hand; the Republican committees had $77.4 million.

While the Republicans still have the upper hand in fundraising, the gap is closing. What is amazing is that with the Republicans still outspending the Democrats, the Republicans are facing a certain defeat in November.