With Courage in Their Blood and a Fire in Their Stare

Congratulations to Mr. Patrick Robert Vincent for correctly naming "With or Without You" by U2 as the Monday Song of the Day. I've mentioned Patrick here a few times, but if you want to keep up with how he and Noel are doing in Wuhan, China, you can read about it here.

It appears that I sorely underestimated Mitt Romney. I think I was as surprised as everyone else yesterday when the Romney campaign announced that it had raised approximately $20 million dollars in the first quarter of 2007. This figure does match the record-setting $26 million raised by Hillary Clinton, but tops the $15 million raised by Rudy and the $12.5 raised by John McCain. It also warrants mentioning that Romney put $2.35 million of his own money into his campaign coffers.

Now, I should note that fundraising is not necessarily equal to winning voters, but it seems that people would not be giving their money to a candidate unless they believe that he has a sincere chance of winning the White House. In particular, the New York Times' piece that I have linked to attempts to answer the question of whether Romney's surprising showing is simply a case of a few large donors or instead is a broad, grass-roots style effort:

"Unlike the other leading primary campaigns, Mr. Romney’s declined to disclose how many individual donors had contributed or how many small donations it had received. Some campaigns use those measurements to show that they have broad support."

We will have to see how this strong showing affects the rest of Romney's campaign (we are in April 2007 after all), but it seems to have already shown that John McCain's fortunes continue to fall among conservative voters. I know that we are about 10 months from "Super Tuesday", but Sen. McCain has some major ground to make up if he wants a chance to sit in the Oval Office.