Clinton leads fundraising pack

WASHINGTON – Candidates eyeing 2008 presidential bids collected millions for a variety of campaign committees over the first three months of the year, with New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton far ahead of the pack.

Clinton, who faces two little-known Republican opponents in her bid for a second term in November, raised $6 million from Jan. 1 to March 31 – outdistancing the 32 other senators seeking re-election this fall as well as her prospective rivals for the presidential nomination.

Clinton has now raised better than $39 million for her re-election effort since coming to the Senate in 2001 and ended last month with nearly $20 million in the bank.

Election law allows anything left over from her Senate campaign to be transferred to a presidential campaign.

Among Republicans, Sen. George Allen of Virginia is showing the most fundraising muscle, collecting $1.75 million for his re-election fight and closing the quarter with $7.2 million on hand. Unlike Clinton, however, Allen faces a potentially serious challenge this fall.

With the cost of winning a party’s nomination for president in 2008 estimated by political analysts to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, such a heavy focus on fundraising so early in the campaign is seen as a necessity for those candidates hoping to compete seriously.