MCain to Meet Fundraising Targets

From the Atlantic Monthly:

Sen. John McCain will raise more than $12.5M this fundraising quarter, surpassing last quarter's total and meeting the campaign's internal targets.

"We'll do better than we did last quarter," said John Weaver, McCain's chief stategist.

Weaver declined to say how much he thought McCain would ultimately raise. He dismissed as simply false a report that McCain was on track to raise less than $10M. Both Weaver and campaign manager Terry Nelson have said that reports that McCain would need to raise $20M to be viable did not reflect the thinking of the campaign or the candidate.

Fine, technically, McCain does not need to raise $20 million to be viable, but when you top competitors are raising $25 to $30 million, your $12.5 is not going to carry very far. Unless McCain reigns in teh spending that I noted earlier today, he is not going to have much in the way of money to compete.

But here is the larger issue, the less money McCain raises, unfortunately, the less viable he looks as a candidate in the eyes of donors and the less money he will raise in the third quarter. His campaign is headed into a tailspin and McCain may not be able to recover from this one.