--> Today, Barack Obama told his supporters that he will opt out of public financing, and instead his campaign will rely on private donations. Basically, this means he can raise more money than any candidate ever. He already has more than 1.5 million donors - if each of them gave an average of $200, then that's $300 million to work with, whereas public financing will only get McCain $85 million. McCain has already committed to accept public financing, so now this puts pressure on him to either be grossly outspent or to back out of his promise. Obama had made a similar, if vaguer, promise, but his rationale is apparently that the public financing system is broken anyway, and opting into it would only allow the Republicans to exploit its loopholes against him.
--> McCain is going to try to make a campaign issue out of this decision, already claiming that this demonstrates that Obama is a "typical politician." Unfortunately for them, most voters don't care about the fundraising elements of campaigns. It tends to be flag pins and Swift Boats that get voters' attention.
--> More bad news for McCain - Obama released his first major ad buy of the general election today, running this ad in 18 key states. It talks about his humble backgrounds, and how his mother and grandparents instilled core American values in him. It's a way to divert attention from the fundraising decision, and to generate further confidence in his patriotism. The states he's targetting: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia. Besides the usual swing-state suspects, Obama's campaign is casting a very wide net into normally Republican territory. McCain is going to be run very thin by this campaign, both in terms of money and energy.
--> Obama has long talked about how he admires the Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The biography focuses on how Lincoln brought together his biggest adversaries within the party, and brought them into his administration. There's a great article about this subject in Time today, which continues to lead me to believe that he's at least somewhat interested in bringing Hillary Clinton into his White House, most likely as VP. He seems to like the idea of keeping his opponents close, and that would certainly be an effective way of doing it.
Short post today; yesterday's took a long time. I'll have more tomorrow.
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