Mitt raised more than $5 million today?

After a disappointing second place finish in New Hampshire? I guess rumors of Romney’s death have been greatly exaggerated. I think that makes him today’s biggest cash generator.

Today, in Boston, fundraisers and friends gathered and raised over 5 Million dollars for the Mitt campaign. Compare that to Hillary who raised $750,000 the day after her stunning victory.

By the way, they raised almost $110,000 out of Arizona alone! Does that top McCain’s total take.

Here’s the campaign’s official announcement of the haul. That is some major scratch. And for a guy who keeps coming in second. As Darth Vader might say, impressive.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been discussing the status of the candidacies with friends in email along with just surveying the landscape after New Hampshire. Mitt so far has two second place finishes in contested states and a first in Wyoming, which amounts to uncontested since he was the only candidate to have had any organization there. On paper, Romney is an impressive candidate if you go by his resume. No one else on either side can match him on experience outside and inside government, but experience isn’t everything. If it was, Obama wouldn’t even be in the hunt anymore. Ideas aren’t everything either, or Fred’s campaign would have more of a pulse. Thompson put out a serious plan to cut government spending today, but because his campaign lacks buzz, the plan didn’t generate much coverage. Fred’s impressive as an idea guy and someone who can cut the media down to size and I think he’d make a good commander in chief. Well, I think. He hasn’t run the best campaign, that’s for sure. But neither has Huckabee, who seems like a nice guy who tends to wing it more than is wise, and neither have McCain or Giuliani but one of these guys has to win it eventually.

The way I see things right now, we have three viable candidates and two secondary candidates. The former include McCain, Huckabee and Romney and in more or less that order even though Romney leads the delegate count. The secondary candidates right now have to be Giuliani and Thompson, in that order. They’re all facing various death scenarios; McCain doesn’t play well with the base and doesn’t have a lot of cash, while Huckabee seems to be getting locked into a niche candidacy and Romney just needs to pick up a real win somewhere or he may end up on life support no matter how much money he has. The danger for him is that by becoming locked in second place, he becomes a de facto second choice guy. That’s no way to get to the general election, where second place leaves you out of luck. But any of these three could win if things break the right way, and if a couple drop out it’s not impossible to see even Fred sneaking up and winning. But by staying in, they’re all sucking up various parts of the conservative base and leaving an opening for Giuliani to do well enough in the big states on Super Terrific Tuesday to win.

What I’m saying is, this thing is still wide open. With Romney picking up a huge chunk of cash today, he’s showing that his supporters aren’t dispirited and he’s not done yet.

Update: A point of comparison is probably worth tossing out. Wired has Hillary Clinton pulling in a little over $1.1 million since the NH primary, but that’s without any pitch. The Romney camp pulled its haul in as a National Call Day. He pulled in more than Hillary, but Hillary wasn’t making a special effort. So there’s that.

In the money game, most donors on both sides are tapped out, but the Democrats still seem to have an advantage in that their pool of donors remains larger than the Republicans.

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