That's pretty much the spin from the Politico this afternoon as the online political journal spun Barack Obama's campaign fundraising performance into bad news for Republican presidential aspiratios in 2008.
Here's the text of the "breaking news" e-mail from Politico.com. That's right, it's so important it deserved a breaking news alert to Politico readers' inboxes:
The Politico.com Breaking News:
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GOP Gets Swamped in Money Hunt
The $25 million raised by Barack Obama this year is the latest bad news for Republicans.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0407/3419.html
For more information...http://www.politico.com
Following the link takes you to a story by Politico's Jeanne Cummings that was published earlier this afternoon.
Here's how Cummings began her article:
In the much-watched first quarter of presidential fundraising, the Democratic candidates raised more than twice as much as their Republican counterparts, a huge gap that is putting added pressure on a party already struggling to regroup after the November elections.
According to preliminary fundraising numbers released by the campaigns this week, the combined Democratic field raised about $80 million, compared with roughly $40 million collected by their GOP adversaries.
Of course, that is worrisome to some insiders, but in no point in her article does Cummings explore whether this is typical of incumbent parties in the home stretch of a two-term presidency.
Cummings also left out consideration of whether conservative base voters are withholding money out of concerns over ideological purity of the candidates, many of whom (Romney, McCain, Giuliani) do not have a strong track record of consistently conservative positions. The closest she got was saying that donors are waiting for a frontrunner to emerge in the race.
Instead, it's the war in Iraq and Bush's handling of it that Cummings holds up to blame for a slower flow of campaign contributions into candidate coffers:
The political drag of the Iraq war has created some fatigue for party activists, who are still adjusting to the Democratic-controlled Congress.
