by Christi Parsons
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Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota jumped on the Barack Obama bandwagon today, saying he’d stayed out of the fray when four of his colleagues were in the mix and that he’d “just decided I’m going to wait and watch here for a while.”
He didn’t explain why he’d gotten off the fence just now . . . after Obama has won eleven nominating contests in a row and is heading toward the crucial Ohio and Texas primaries with a perceived advantage.
Then again, as Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said Wednesday, it’s never good in politics to get ahead of oneself.
Plouffe said Wednesday that Obama isn’t ready to talk about foregoing a privately funded campaign in favor of a publicly financed one, even though he first raised the question months ago about doing so if he made it to the general election as the party nominee.
“Our focus in on the four contests next Tuesday,” Plouffe said. “If and when we secure the nomination, we will sit down with the McCain campaign” and discuss the possibility.
Not coincidentally, the Obama campaign announced that it had crossed 1 million mark in the number of campaign donors. Back when Obama first raised the idea of running a lower-budget campaign with public money, nobody knew how prodigious a private fundraiser he’d turn out to be.