Barack Obama

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama raised more than $150 million in September, a stunning and unprecedented eruption of political giving that has given him a wide spending advantage over rival John McCain. The campaign released the figure on Sunday, one day before it must file a detailed report of its monthly finances with the Federal Election Commission. Obama’s money is fueling a vast campaign operation in an expanding field of competitive states. It also has underwritten a wave of both national and targeted video advertising unseen before in a presidential contest.

Campaign manager David Plouffe, in an e-mail to supporters Sunday morning, said the campaign had added 632,000 new donors in September, for a total of 3.1 million contributors to the campaign. He said the average donation was $86.

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Recently trailing or tied, Democrat Barack Obama now leads Republican John McCain in a trio of the most critical, vote-rich states five weeks before the election, according to presidential poll results released Wednesday. 

The Democrat’s support jumped to 50 percent or above in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania in Quinnipiac University surveys taken during the weekend — after the opening presidential debate and during Monday’s dramatic stock market plunge as the House rejected a $700 billion financial bailout plan.

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Hillary Clinton wasn’t just the underdog in New Hampshire. After Barack Obama’s Iowa win, she was written off – by the pollsters, by the pundits and by her own campaign staff. At times, Senator Clinton herself seemed resigned and dispirited.

But the voters of New Hampshire hadn’t written Clinton off at all. With drama worthy of New Hampshire’s flamboyant political history, Senator Clinton repeated the epic comeback that sent her husband on his way to the White House in 1992. It was a squeaker, but it was a win.

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Call it an early Christmas gift for Hillary Clinton’s campaign: A new Iowa poll seems to show the New York senator with a stunning double-digit lead over her nearest rival among likely Democratic caucus-goers.

Clinton and Obama were neck-and-neck in last week’s American Research Group poll. But in the new survey, conducted December 20-23, she leads the Illinois senator by 15 percentage points, 34 to 19 percent. Obama is now in a statistical tie for second place with former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who has 20 percent of the vote.

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Writing on the Huffington Post today, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who has endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton for president, took one of the hardest swipes to date at Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign policy credentials.

Pivoting off a Thursday article in the London Times, Wilson argues that Obama’s “intuitive grasp” of the world is no match for his lack of travel and “dearth” of international experience.

“Intuition may be a laudable quality among psychics and palm readers,” the Ambassador writes, “but for a professional American diplomat like myself, who have spent a career toiling in the vineyards of national security, it has no relevance to serious discussion of foreign policy. In fact, Obama’s supposed “intuitive sense” is no different from George W. Bush’s ‘instincts’ and ‘gut feeling’ describing his own foreign policy decision-making. We have been down this road before.”

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Some interesting results from the first Rasmussen Reports poll out of Iowa today:

Mitt Romney still leads the Republican field by six points (25%) while Hillary Clinton leads her Democratic competitors (33%) by nearly twice as much, 11 points.

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Oprah Winfrey’s recent campaign swing with Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was greeted with wild cheers and record-breaking crowds.  But some of the talk show host’s fans aren’t happy she’s become politically outspoken, and many are sounding off on Oprah’s Web site.  “Oprah,” says one, “count me as tuned out for now.” Another writes, “It’s a real turn off for a lot of your fans.” And yet another says “She has crossed a line and lost my trust completely.”

But, what’s especially interesting about reading Oprah’s Web site is why some of those fans seem to be upset: the way she stumped for Obama, they say, seemed to pit white against black.

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 Three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Republican voters across the country appear uninspired by their field of presidential candidates, with a vast majority saying they have not made a final decision about whom to support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Not one of the Republican candidates is viewed favorably by even half the Republican electorate, the poll found. And in a sign of the fluidity of the race, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who barely registered in early polls several months ago, is now locked in a tight contest nationally with Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

By contrast, Democrats are happier with their field and more settled in their decisions. For all the problems Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to be having holding off her rivals in Iowa and New Hampshire, she remains strong nationally, the poll found. Even after what her aides acknowledge have been two of the roughest months of her candidacy, she is viewed by Democrats as a far more electable presidential nominee than either Senator Barack Obama or John Edwards.

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