Obama's Plan

Drudge has the memo from David Plouffe on the next four weeks of Obamania:

Coming off an impressive win in Iowa and taking the once inevitable frontrunner down to the wire in her firewall state, it is clear that Obama is well-positioned to become the next President of the United States. As the people of Iowa and New Hampshire demonstrated, the American people desperately want change they can believe in. Barack Obama is the candidate to deliver that change by bringing people together, standing up to the special interests, and telling people what they need to know.

Our campaign now turns its focus squarely to Nevada and South Carolina, and February 5th. Today, we kick off the next phase of our campaign in New Jersey, an important February 5th state.

Fundraising

In the 4th Quarter of 2007, our campaign raised $23.5 million – over $22.5 million of which is for the primary election. In that quarter, we added 111,000 new donors for a total of 475,000 donors in 2007.

In the first 8 days of 2008, we raised over $8 million and gained 35,000 new donors. Since midnight last night, we have raised another $500,000 online. We continue to build a grassroots movement that makes us best-positioned to compete financially in the primaries and caucuses coming up...

It couldn't hurt to add to that total, if you can.

I'm still smarting from last night—it was something of a "reality check" for my "false hopes"—but I honestly think the long-term prognosis is still good. The media feeding frenzy in the last week drove expectations totally out of control, obscuring the fact that the actual news for Obama in the last seven days has been overwhelmingly good—true, the Obama team wasn't able to get the knockout, but they probably weren't ever going to be able to. But it's certainly not as if they've been knocked out themselves.

Not incidentally, my love/hate relationship with John Edwards is tilting strongly towards "hate" again. I admire the man and I admire especially the way in which he's moved the rhetoric in the Democratic primary to the left, but his chances of securing the nomination are rapidly approaching the fantastic and I see no reason for him to stay in other than ego. We've been down this road with Nader enough times, haven't we? The sooner he drops out, the sooner the "change" ticket is able to coalesce around the only anti-Clinton with a chance of winning the nomination.