Obama campaign raises a record $66m in August

Barack Obama's campaign announced yesterday that its fund-raising tally from August was its best showing to date. The campaign raised an eye-popping $66 million last month, thanks to more than 500,000 new contributors. The campaign says it now has 2.5 million contributors and $77 million on hand.

"The 500,000 new donors to the Obama campaign demonstrate just how strongly the American people are looking to kick the special interests out and change Washington," Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, said in a statement.

"We are proud of the millions of volunteers and more than 2.5 million donors to the Obama campaign who are contributing to help us deliver the change we need instead of letting John McCain just continue the same failed Bush policies while middle-class Americans struggle," Plouffe said.

McCain, though, put up his own impressive numbers in August, raising more than $47 million, in part thanks to conservative donors excited about his pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The $47 million included money raised by the campaign and McCain's share of a joint fund-raising arrangement with the Republican Party.

McCain has opted for public financing, which gives him about $85 million in public money but prevents him, now that he's been officially nominated, from raising additional money from donors.

SCOTT HELMAN

Former Bush political adviser Karl Rove became an unlikely critic of John McCain yesterday, charging that the Republican presidential nominee had joined Barack Obama in shading the truth in campaign advertising.

"McCain has gone, in some of his ads, similarly gone one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent truth test," Rove said on "Fox News Sunday."

The Obama campaign has complained especially about a McCain ad declaring that Obama supports sex education for kindergartners. He supported a program to teach children how to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable touching to help them ward off sexual predators.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A new group financed by a Texas billionaire and organized by some of the same political operatives and donors behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John F. Kerry in 2004 plans to begin running television ads attacking Barack Obama.

The move could be another sign that independent groups will play a larger role than anticipated in the closing days of the presidential race.

The American Issues Project has amassed a multimillion-dollar fund, and the group is putting the final touches on an eleventh-hour campaign targeting the Democratic presidential nominee, sources said. "We expect to be doing both issues and express advocacy between now and November and beyond," said Christian Pinkston, a spokesman for the group.

The effort could mark a sharp turn in what has been an unusually quiet year for outside political groups. At this point in 2004, such groups had already spent about $100 million on television commercials attacking Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and President Bush, but they have devoted $8 million to ads so far in this election cycle.

The resurgence on the right appears as though it will not go unanswered. The Service Employees International Union is set to unveil a multimillion-dollar television campaign today, and other liberal and Democratic-aligned groups are rushing to establish financing for efforts over the final weeks of the campaign.

WASHINGTON POST

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has left the wilds of Alaska, but she hasn't quite left the mountains.

In her first cautious steps on the campaign trail without John McCain, the Alaska governor is making a brief swing through the West. It's a region the campaign believes will be particularly receptive to Palin's Washington-outsider message and outdoorsy persona.

It's also a place poised to swing the election.

In her first solo stump speech in the lower 48 states on Saturday, Palin addressed a cheering crowd in Carson City, Nev., in a roller hockey rink in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains. She joked easily about hockey moms, the air show in town, and her husband's Piper Cub plane.

The next stop is Colorado, where Palin planned a rally today at an indoor riding center in the Denver suburbs.

Campaigning for Barack Obama in battleground Ohio yesterday, Hillary Clinton singled out Palin by using a revised applause-line delivered at last month's Democratic convention. Clinton told about 1,650 supporters in an Akron high school gymnasium that Palin and McCain would only continue the policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. "No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin," Clinton said as the audience cheered.

ASSOCIATED PRESS