OK so if you haven’t been following, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were caught talking to one another on an open mic. Originally most people were not sure exactly what they meant but everyone has come to believe Edwards was saying to Clinton during a forum which included all the candidates, that there should be less candidates. Clinton kind of agreed and Dennis Kucinich (If you don’t know who that is, he is running for president) got mad when he read about it the next day in the news. He didn’t actually hear it because I guarantee you Clinton & Edwards & Obama don’t talk to him but someone told him and he was pretty pissed.
Online donations are emerging as a cornerstone of the fund-raising efforts of Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, who have raised roughly a third of their money through Internet contributions, mostly in small-dollar amounts. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been aggressive online as well. Their efforts have paid off with a rapidly growing army of small donors, many of whom have demonstrated a willingness to give again and again.
Newly released data show that for the first six months of the year, the three leading contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Obama of Illinois, Mr. Edwards of North Carolina, and Mrs. Clinton of New York, raised more than $28 million online, a figure that does not include second-quarter results from Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign declined to release them. In contrast, the three top Republican candidates, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney, raised about $14 million over the Internet.
Just the other day Giuliani’s Southern campaign chair Senator David Vitter from Louisiana admitted to using prostitutes. Today John McCain’s House co-chair Florida state Rep. Bob Allen faces charges of soliciting homosexual sex from an undercover police officer.
“I am filing a not guilty plea. I am vigorously going to fight this,” he said. “I am not resigning my office, because the people elected me [and] want me to do a good job and I am going to do a good job for them in finishing this term. …
“This is an ugly and unpleasant situation that has been thrust upon me and my family that is not true, it is inaccurate and it is therefore not guilty.”
Two more campaign staffers compromising an important part of his Iowa team left. “Edward D. Failor Jr., who ran the Iowa field operation for the Bush campaign in 2004 and signed on to the McCain campaign in February, said that he and Karen Slifka, another top Iowa aide, were resigning from the increasingly lean McCain Iowa operation.”
