Freudenthal said Wednesday he was impressed by the large, enthusiastic crowds that turned out when Obama visited Wyoming ahead of the state's caucuses last month. Freudenthal also said Obama struck him as "incredibly smart" and someone who gave honest answers instead of scripted responses.
Ironically it was Bill Clinton who previously named Freudenthal as Wyoming's U.S. attorney back in 1994, where Freudenthal held that job until 2001. Freudenthal then was elected governor in 2002, and then re-elected in 2006. On the other hand Democratic Convention Watch has removed, Sen Russ Feingold (D-WI) as he said he is really torn by both candidates. I read the article and I am not seeing him go to the uncommitted, he was merely being his good political self in answering the question. All told I now have Obama with 215 hard count superdelegate endorsements and a soft count reaching 224 (8 NC's and Cartwell).
The Obama campaign reportedly raised more than $30 million in the month of March, says TIME a campaign official told TIME yesterday, (privately I heard it was closer to $40M saying they want to have Clinton substantiate theirs and then officially blow them away like February's numbers--- games within the game).
Though the official would not provide an exact number, he did say, "The number starts with a three and we are still counting. It's in the 30s."
While a monthly fundraising total of $30 million or more would be well short of the more than $55 million Obama raised during the month of February, it would still represent nearly $1 million a day - a healthy pace for a campaign that had a politically rocky last few weeks...
...As of Tuesday night, the Clinton campaign had not released its March totals. But one Clinton campaign adviser hinted that the New York senator's total for the month will come close to $20 million. That estimate could not be independently confirmed.
Word of Obama's latest financial benchmark comes amid continued reports that the Clinton campaign is struggling with a persistent debt that at times has reached nearly $9 million, according to published reports and Democratic party officials. ...There have been scattered reports in recent weeks that various campaign vendors have not been paid for work or services that have already been rendered, with some taking to the airwaves to complain...
...While some inside the campaign are concerned about whether Clinton will have the funds to match Obama in radio and TV advertising buys through May, others are worried about a different horizon. One Clinton adviser wondered whether that what he called the "massive debt" was beginning to hang over not simply the campaign but Clinton's political future. How, this adviser asked, can the campaign climb out of "the debt hole if we don't win this whole thing?" Facing a Senate re-election campaign in 2012, he noted, Clinton's choice is daunting: "If you have a $10 million debt when this thing is over, she has to pay it off, and then, four years later, raise $30 to $40 million" to wage a re-election campaign.
There was little to suggest in the latest financial reports that a lack of money could drive Clinton from the race soon. A $20 million month, though less than Obama's total, would under any other circumstances be a respectable total for a political fundraising operation. But it would nonetheless leave Clinton a step or two behind Obama in a another vital political metric: financial strength. A lingering debt, meanwhile, would mean that Clinton could face a longer-term consequence of an extended campaign.
One of today's best blog reads goes to Talking Points Memo (TMP Cafe) called Obama's Lama Problem:
Hello again, everyone. I’ve been much too busy with the day job lately, and I’ll have to put off until next week the post I want to write on Obama’s remarkable policy statement on disability (that's a pdf, btw). For now, I just want to note this little curio from today’s papers. It’s a McClatchy Newspapers item filed by one Margaret Talev, and it graces the front page of my own hometown paper, the Centre Daily Times. In it, Ms. Talev visits Hazelton, PA, which, despite being the ancestral home of Obama Girl (I did not know that!), is largely representative of Hillary Clinton’s eastern-PA stronghold. Come with us now to Jimmy’s Quick Lunch, where folks are talking to Ms. Talev about what's on their minds Obama, Duser said:"I'm not crazy about voting for a colored guy, but that's not why I don't support Obama. I'm not prejudiced. I just like Hillary."A couple tables over, Jean Fetterman, a foster grandparent, said of Clinton: "Oh, I love her. She's a very intelligent person, and she has her husband who went through this."She scoffs at the idea of voting for Obama: "I don't want to be a Muslim!" She looks dubious when told Obama is Christian. "Then why did he go see what's-his-name over in Iraq, that Lama?"Well, this is really just a horrible mashup. First of all, despite the remarks of some of his more enthusiastic surrogates, Obama has not actually said that he will convert all Americans to Islam. And he didn’t go to Iraq, either. Let’s get this straight once and for all: that one time when he went to visit the llama, he wore the traditional garb of Suriname. He did it only because llamas, like illegal Mexicans, are from South America. Any politician, colored or regular, would have done the same.
Sigh. But there you have it– this is now Clinton’s base. This is why the Clinton campaign has been making such strange and credibility-destroying arguments in the past couple of weeks: because those arguments are "credibility-destroying" only among high-information voters. Here, by contrast, are the firewall voters; these are the people the campaign is talking to and depending on.
People who might be convinced that Barack Arrogant Obama wasn’t really a real law professor like he says he was. People who can be convinced that Obama thugs are trying to prevent them from voting and participating in our great American democracy. People who think Hussein Obama X is Muslim and that Jeremiah Wright will burn this mother to the ground. And, not least, people who fear that Obama will turn them into a llama.
I call it “Hillary’s New Groove.”
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