IS McCAIN IN TROUBLE?

REPUBLICAN FUND RAISING

Several Republican candidates for the presidency have revealed their fund-raising numbers for the second quarter. Rudy Guiliani leads this race with $17 million. Mitt Romney is next with $14 million.

The Republicans are trailing Democrats in fund raising. The top three Republicans (Guiliani, Romney, and McCain) raised a total of $49 million in the second quarter. That compares with $69 million for the top three Democrats (Obama, Clinton, and Edwards). The top Democratic fund raiser, Barack Obama, raised nearly twice as much money as Guiliani, $32.5 million to $17 million.

The really big news here, though, is that John McCain is really hurting. His campaign collected much less than expected, less even than he raised during the first quarter. He has only $2 million in the bank to fund his campaign. Because of this, he is going to skip the influential Iowa straw poll, and he is cutting his campaign staff way back, from 120 to 40.

Democratic candidate Dr Carl Perrin of course collected even less campaign money than McCain, but Perrin is still in good shape. He wasn’t planning to enter the Iowa race anyway, and he won’t have to cut back on his campaign staff because he doesn’t have one. Incredible as it seems, Perrin is running his own campaign, answering the phone, writing campaign literature, and all that stuff.

Of course Perrin has a lot of volunteers working for him. He said he doesn’t need campaign headquarters all around the country because he has lived in a lot of different states and has contacts who will be ready to help him when the time comes. He’s especially strong in Ocean County, New Jersey, and in Maine, where volunteers are collecting returnable bottles to help finance his campaign.