Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:
* Bush used to be an unstoppable fundraising machine for the GOP. Not anymore: “Financial projections for the President’s Dinner tonight confirm that Republican confidence in the president is in a state of collapse. The National Republican Congressional Committee’s (NRCC) fundraising goal is $7.5 million, which is half what was raised last year. But to reach this lesser goal, each individual lawmaker has been asked to raise the same amount as 12 months ago. In other words, the NRCC is assuming lawmakers won’t be either willing or able to hit the targets they managed last year.”
* Subscribers to the always-conservative Jerusalem Post received an email solicitation yesterday from the Giuliani campaign, which characterized Dems as being unreliable allies of Israel. In an odd twist, the pitch wasn’t sent specifically by Team Giuliani, but rather from the newspaper itself. (In the “from” column of the email, it said, “The Jerusalem Post.”) As Greg Sargent explained, “There’s nothing untoward about sending out fundraising mail to lists that are rented from others — campaigns do that all the time. However, it does seem a bit unorthodox for the sender of the email to be identified as the newspaper, and not the campaign.”
* NBC’s Chuck Todd thinks the McCain campaign is faltering badly and may not recover: “Can Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the initial GOP front-runner, raise enough money by the time the second-quarter campaign finance books close on June 30 to survive and continue on? While his candidacy might not be dead, it is, at best, on life support at this point.” The Washington Times added this morning that McCain’s campaign “is showing signs of unraveling.”
* With polls showing him leading in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mitt Romney hopes to solidify his position with additional television advertising. The NYT reports, “[Romney] has spent some $4 million on television advertising since February, focusing mostly on Iowa and New Hampshire… He increased his advertising in a huge way last month, spending more than $2 million, much of it on national cable advertisements. This month, he added a run of television commercials in South Carolina, another early primary.” None of the other leading GOP candidates have aired television spots.
* And Hillary Clinton got a boost in Nevada yesterday when Dana Titus, the Dems’ gubernatorial nominee last year, endorsed the New York senator.