Dems do well in fundraising for February

Both Democratic Party presidential hopefuls were trying to clarify issues.

COMBINED DISPATCHES

HANGING ROCK, Ohio — Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign raised $35 million in February, its biggest monthly haul ever — but far short of the $50 million Barack Obama was expected to raise over the same period.

For Clinton, about $30 million came online from small donors in the days following her January announcement she had loaned her campaign $5 million from her share of the family wealth. Clinton is using her new cash to pay for do-or-die campaigns in Ohio and Texas — and hasn’t paid herself back, she told reporters here Thursday.

“I was sure excited by the generosity of thousands of new donors,” said Clinton after hosting a town hall on rural poverty in this hard-hit Appalachian Ohio town. “It’s incredibly gratifying to see people coming forward with their vote of confidence. It was very heartening to see the outpouring of support.”

Obama is on pace to raise $50 million in February — a record for monthly fundraising in a primary, according to a person familiar with his fundraising.

The windfall represents a radical shift in a Clinton fund-raising strategy long predicated on attracting a relatively small group of large contributors. About 200,000 new donors gave an average of $100 each, most of them galvanized by word of loan to the campaign.

All but $1 million can be used in her primary campaign.

Clinton spent Thursday in economically depressed southeast Ohio, a region that has been hard hit by the foreclosure crisis and the loss of industrial jobs. She began her day visiting in a mobile home with nine residents of Pomeroy, where the poverty rate tops 20 percent, double the state average.

Bryan Holman, a 40-year-old correction officer, asked Clinton if her proposed mandate that all Americans sign up for health insurance would result in fines if he failed to pay premiums — as Obama has charged.

“That’s misleading — that’s not at all what’s going to happen,” she said.

Clinton offered a plan to improve childhood nutrition and set a goal to reduce by half the 12 million youngsters living in poverty over the next dozen years.

The package of proposals includes a “comprehensive” early education initiative that starts with nurse’s visits for pregnant women, lets children begin the Head Start program earlier and calls for universal pre-kindergarten programs.

She spelled out her proposals in a speech Thursday at the child care development center on Ohio University’s southern campus, and toured a Head Start program serving economically challenged southern Ohio. It was part of her effort to focus the Democratic campaign on bedrock economic issues.

Later, Clinton later to Houston, where she spelled out her ambitious energy plan to polite applause from about 1,000 people attending a business conference.

During a Barack Obama Town Hall on the economy, the topic turned to education, which, the Illinois senator said, could be not remedied by spending alone. “It doesn’t matter how much money we put in if parents don’t parent,” he scolded.

The line is one the Democrat delivers often, but on Thursday in Beaumont, Texas, he struck a remarkable chord with his mostly black audience. He told them to be parents who take responsibility for their children’s actions in school and at home.

At a town hall forum in Austin, Texas, Obama said Thursday the economy is “on the brink of a recession” and blamed economic policies espoused by President Bush and Republican presidential contender John McCain.

Obama mocked a more optimistic economic picture painted by Bush at a White House news conference just moments earlier: “People are struggling in the midst of an economy that George Bush says is not a recession but is experienced differently by folks on the ground.”