Redstate

Posted at 11:02am on Jun. 6, 2008 So I'm putting together a story about May 2008 fundraising.

Just a sort of snapshot.

By Moe Lane

The AP notes that McCain has raised $21.5 million in May, with $31.5 million in the bank; while the RNC has raised $23.5 million, with $53.6 in the bank. So I thought that it might be interesting to see what everybody else's numbers were.

I won't go over the gory details of the telephone calls: suffice it to say that you should reasonably expect the Democratic and Republican legislative groups to reveal their numbers somewhere around the filing deadline. And if the DNC ever gets back to me, they'll probably tell me about the same thing. Not bad phone service from any of the groups that I called up, by the way...

Except for the Obama Presidential campaign, oddly enough. You start with a automated voice messaging system (the Congressional/Senatorial groups have actual people taking the calls; that may be a volume thing, of course); followed up by the standard directory. The oddity, however, is that in five minutes of steadily-bemused calling I couldn't actually get a live person on the phone. The "leave-a-message" canned answers were always followed by a "Messages cannot be recorded," followed by a dial-zero-for-attendant, which led right back to "leave-a-message" - while trying to back into the system by hitting other options led to the all-operators-are-busy-please-call-back-later. The one exception I found to this was their contributions line, which gave the option to leave a message, which did work - or, at least, I got a beep. And, of course, the system took every opportunity to send people to the website, which (to me, at least) is corporate shorthand for "We don't actually want to talk to you." By contrast, John McCain 2008 connected me to an actual human being within one minute.

Not to be mean or anything, but I'm guessing that there's a certain difference in priority levels there.

Moe Lane

PS: I'm going to guess that the DNC / Obama folks release their numbers in a few weeks. Whether or it's going to be on a day with a natural disaster going on somewhere else is a question that each person must ask him- or herself.

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