Opinion: McCain hits the road

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John McCain wasn’t around when his presidential campaign today acknowledged its financial straits. He was traveling ... to Iraq.

Truly, the Arizona Republican isn’t taking the easy road at the moment, literally or figuratively.

The shock in McCain’s fundraising report wasn’t that his donations between March and June totaled about $11.2 million --- less than the roughly $13 million he gathered in the year’s first quarter. The stunner in political circles was that his campaign reported cash-on-hand of only $2 million.

That’s a paltry sum with which to try to sustain a full-fledged contemporary campaign. Media analysts, for instance, estimate that a one-week buy of TV advertising in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina --- the early battleground states in presidential race --- would cost about $1 million all together. And that’s just for an average purchase of time, not market saturation.

Here’s another daunting figure for the McCain folks: Chris Dodd, still struggling to rise much above the asterisk level in the Democratic contest, on Sunday reported having $6.5 million in the bank, more than three times McCain’s figure.

It had seemed clear for several weeks that, with so much attention focused on McCain’s support of the immigration bill hated by so many GOP activists, he would fall short in the fundraising column. But what also is now clear is that organizationally, criticisms that McCain’s campaign was top-heavy with high-priced talent and generally over-staffed have proved valid.

McCain’s trip to Iraq, by the way, is the latest of several the Navy veteran has made there since the war started. He plans to spend July 4th with U.S. troops.

-- Don Frederick