Obama fundraising breaks record

With just three weeks to go before America elects its new president, the Democrats are making a mockery of the global financial crisis. In August, Barack Obama's team raised $66m and campaign officials say that the amount raised in September exceeds even that.

"Barack Obama finds himself in an enviable position," says Sam Stein on the Huffington Post. Not only are Republican attack ads backfiring, but Obama, with his millions in the bank, can afford the sort of advertising campaign that a race for the White House has never seen before.

The LA Times reports that Obama has used his financial edge to turn once-reliable Republican states into "hard-fought battlegrounds". He has out-spent McCain eight-to-one on television advertising in North Carolina and three-to-one in Indiana, both states where a Democrat has not won for 30 years. And at the end of this month, Obama will spend a massive chunk of his funds on a half-hour primetime broadcast on both CBS and NBS.

Since Obama first started fundraising way back in early 2007 he has raised more than twice as much as any candidate in history - and he has done so during a period in which the American public keep complaining that they have less and less to spend. Come the day of the election, Obama will have easily surpassed the $500m mark.

But Obama could yet find himself in hot water. There are legal issues surrounding the size of individual gifts and contributions from foreign donors, although Obama himself insists that most of his money is gifted to him by affectionate Americans like 'Murphy', a grandmother from New York who told the LA Times that whenever she has some spare money she gives a little to Obama.

More good news for the Democrats is that independent campaign groups have lavished as much as $16m on the Illinois Senator, about three times as much as groups supporting the Republicans have managed to cough up for John McCain.

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 13, 2008