Obama raises $150 million.

Barack Obama has shattered campaign finance records with the news that, in September, he doubled the amount he raised in August and took in an astonishing $150 million in political donations.

Obama can now flood the airwaves with his ads in the run up to the election and he is giving every indication that he intends to so deep in McCain's backyard.

Mr. Obama intends to devote most of his time over the next 15 days in states that President Bush won, aides said, going to Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, has ruled out trying to expand his electoral map but is waging an aggressive effort defending those states, the largest of which still could fall either way.

And there is every indication that in North Carolina and Virginia Obama may very well make his mark deep, deep inside Republican home turf.

But the tidal wave of enthusiasm for him points to him not just winning the White House but capturing two important states of the Old Confederacy, North Carolina and Virginia.

Both have reliably gone Republican during every presidential election for 40 years, and only once since 1948 has Virginia voted to put a Democrat in the White House. On a US electoral map, these are the highest peaks of prejudice the Democrat is poised to overcome. North Carolina, especially, is a place where some of the nastiest race-based campaigns have been fought in modern times. The ground is now shaking under the country club Republicans as the polls give Senator Obama a margin of some 10 percentage points in Virginia and put North Carolina on a knife edge.

Some Republicans are already writing off Virginia as a lost cause and, if that turns out to be the case, Obama will take the White House.

McCain, a man who has always reveled in his underdog status, continues to claim that he will take the White House against all the odds.

“We’re going to win Ohio, and we’re going to show the pundits again that they were wrong,” Mr. McCain said to cheers in Toledo.

I don't think Ohio is going to be enough to stave off an Obama victory and Obama now has serious money to start hurting McCain in lots of other places.

As strategists for Mr. Obama eyed intensifying their efforts in Georgia, North Dakota and West Virginia, Republican advisers were trimming their efforts back to states won by Mr. Bush in 2004 and hoping for the best elsewhere.

Hoping for the best? That's not a strategy at all.

UPDATE:



McCain now accuses Obama of scandal simply on the grounds that he is popular. He's now comparing Obama's ability to raise money with the Watergate scandal.

And, once again, when pushed, he admits that nothing Obama is doing is illegal. But he can't resist attempting to make out that something about Obama is, nevertheless, shady and underhand.

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Tags: Obama, McCain, US election 2008, finance, $150 million, September