Clinton racks up cash record as Bloomberg rules out run
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Hillary Clinton's White House campaign raised 35 million dollars in February, aides said Thursday, but rival Barack Obama was expected to shatter that total with his own record-breaking number.
Advisors to the former first lady said the torrent of money flooding into campaign coffers left her well positioned to take on her Democratic adversary in make-or-break nominating contests next Tuesday in Ohio and Texas.
The billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, could have brought his own deep pockets into the presidential campaign but on Thursday he ruled out an independent challenge to the Republican-Democratic duopoly.
"I am not -- and will not be -- a candidate for president," Bloomberg, 66, wrote in The New York Times.
The former media mogul said he stood ready to back the presidential candidate who can offer independent leadership to heal the nation's political wounds -- but did not specify who that might be.
President George W. Bush meanwhile joined Republican heir apparent John McCain in assailing the Iraq withdrawal plans of Democratic front-runner Obama, who is riding high after 11 nominating wins in a row.
The Illinois senator is now bidding to eliminate Clinton from the race, and at a rally in Austin, Texas looked beyond the primary campaign to accuse Bush and McCain of ignoring the plight of hard-pressed Americans.
The economy is "on the brink of a recession," Obama said, attacking Bush's "billions of tax cuts to the wealthiest" and noting that McCain now supports making those cuts permanent.
"We've got millions of Americans that are being left behind," he said. "We can't afford to wait."
Clinton's campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe vied to wrest back the initiative, denying that his boss was going anywhere after her record fund-raising in February.
"Hillary's going to one place, to Denver as the nominee of the Democratic Party to be president of the United States of America," he said, referring to the party's August nominating convention in Colorado state.
While impressive, Clinton's February total was likely to be eclipsed by Obama's with reports anticipating a figure for the Illinois senator in excess of 50 million dollars.
"We've raised considerably more than her," Obama's spokesman Bill Burton said, while declining to detail a figure.
Battling to compete with Obama's vast grass-roots network of donors, Clinton lent her campaign five million dollars just ahead of the "Super Tuesday" nationwide contests of February 5.
Since news of that loan surfaced on February 6, aides said, more than 200,000 new donors had coughed up to take her total number of contributors to 300,000.
"We have the resources to play in the big states coming up -- Ohio, Texas, Vermont, Rhode Island -- and states beyond," McAuliffe said.
Clinton aides dismissed reports of infighting among campaign staffers in the face of the Obama juggernaut, which on Wednesday touted its one millionth donor so far.
But her campaign suffered a blow with the defection to Obama of another Georgia congressman, John Barrow, a day after civil rights hero John Lewis said he was switching his support to the African-American senator.
Barrow and Lewis are two of the 795 "superdelegates" who are free to vote for whomever they want at the Denver convention.
Clinton adviser Harold Ickes denied that a steady stream of Democratic grandees were defecting to her rival's camp, and accused the media of giving Obama "a pass" thus far.
McCain for one is already anticipating a White House match-up with Obama, with the Arizona senator poised to eliminate the pesky challenge of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and clinch the Republican nomination.
The senators have been waging running battles over Iraq, with the Republican omitting all mention of Clinton to focus his fire on Obama and Democratic promises to pull out of the war.
"It seems that no matter what happens in Iraq, opponents of the war have one answer: retreat," Bush said at a White House news conference.
Obama shot back with a demand to "fundamentally change our foreign policy."
"If I am the Democratic nominee, I will offer the clearest contrast to John McCain's call for four more years of George Bush's policies," he said.
