Kathryn – On this “two Americas” analysis of the Romney campaign versus the other candidates, the simple fact is that Romney’s personal fortune has allowed him to avoid making some of the hard decisions that other campaigns had to make. Big TV buy here or stepped-up voter contact effort there? Campaigns have to make those choices all the time, and are having to make a lot of them in this compressed primary season. But Romney doesn’t have to make as many of them, because he can spend much more than he is able to raise.

Before Super Tuesday, we will finally learn how much of Romney’s own money he spent in the final quarter of 2007. (You remember he declined to tell Tim Russert the figure when asked at the Florida debate.) In his most recent financial report, covering the entire campaign through September 30, 2007, Romney had raised about $62 million, more than any other candidate. But he had also given a little more than $17 million to his campaign. At that point, he had about $9 million in cash on hand, meaning his campaign was running an $8 million dollar deficit by that point. Everybody expects that deficit will skyrocket in the fourth-quarter report, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Romney was a majority, or near-majority, self-financed candidate in that period. And then there is what he has spent in January, which we won’t learn for quite a while.

When the figures come out, there’s no doubt Romney’s rivals will criticize him as a guy who couldn’t stay in the race, or couldn’t conduct the campaign he is conducting, if he, like them, had to rely almost exclusively on the funds he receives from actual supporters. (The other campaigns have debts, but in the last report, the biggest such debt, McCain’s, was one-tenth the size of Romney’s.) They resent Romney for it, and he resents them for attacking him over it. But the basic premise is true.