Election 2008 First Quarter Fundraising Results

OK, so now I know why I was getting email bombarded by the Presidential 2008 hopefulls all last week (Hillary Clinton was on a ROLL!). The first quarter campaign finance deadline was looming and now their TubeMogul viewership peak trend makes sense to me, duh...

Now I can't find a cool politubing video explaining the results. If anyone has one, comment away. But this is my take:

Hillary Clinton (What Hill?): $26 million
Barack Obama (Barack oBAM!a): $25 million
Mitt Romney (Mitt I've-got-tons-of-roMONEY): $23 million
Rudy Giuliani (Rudy apparently-not-enough-jewels-IANI): $15 million
John Edwards (President McDreamy is just too fitting, isn't it?): $14+ million
John McCain (John McCan't): $12.5

The Washington Post has a good article about these campaign fundraising results.

I don't know why they need 20 gagillion dollars but if I were a betting lady (and I'm not, I always lose miserably), my money is on Barack oBAMa or Mitt roMoney. Now I am completely unqualified to pass judgment but out of curiosity I looked up who was essentially running John McCain's campaign versus Mitt Romney. My intuition told me McCain is probably using old school political network methods, and Mitt Romney has whiz-bang kid. I mean, this is the founder of BainCapital. Hello...he knows money, as my husband says "Why was it a surprise he could raise money?"

Please, do not quote me but as I understand according to Chris Cilliza from the Washington Post, John McCain's campaign man is Tom Loeffler.

I don't know if they're the same role but one of Mitt Romney's main men is Alex Castellanos. Oh, and apparently the ivory tower word for these savants is "consigliere". Doesn't that just mean "an advisor", why the heck don't they just call them advisors? They must get to wear special tights or a crown or something.

Funny thing is I see Mr. Loeffler mentioned as a consigliere but Mr. Castellanos as I think a strategist. I also read and probably just juicy unfounded gossip that Romney's campaign wants to shy away from anything France-like as they will play the card that people like Hillary Clinton want us to just become a whiny socialist country like France (ca n'est pas possible) so maybe that's why Havana boy is media-guru and Loeffler is still a consiglieremajig.

So the difference in the two:
Tom Loeffler, an ex-Texas Congressman, a lawyer and lobbyist, and obviously politically tremendously well connected. Maybe he's not anymore after this week, who knows. I read this as “old school”.

Alex Castellanos - Media mogul-type man. Not sure how to read this since he’s been the political go-to guy for many but sounds FLASHY to me.

But way more interesting than Castellanos (for me at least) is Mitt Romney's apparent use of SalesForce.com for his campaign fundraising toolset:

Salesforce.com gets into politics by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- Mitt Romney’s Republican presidential campaign has raised about $20 million so far in 2007 with the help of “com-Mitt” software for interacting (fundraising) with donors. The activity is otherwise known as CRM, customer relationship management, and salesforce.com's on demand platform is the foundation of com-Mitt. Not one to miss a new, and timely, market opportunity, [...]

Now THERE's a businessman for ya!

Anyway, in my peace and love world, I would collect all the money that the candidates who don't stand a chance collected (why on God's green earth did MORE candidates just make a bid for the presidency??? ), plus the extra gazillion these guys collected, and maybe help pay off our national debt, help our little planet with its fever-thing, make sure our kids don't come butt-last in all areas of education, or make a really pretty park somewhere.

I'm probably not going to be anyone's consigliagagaga anytime soon…