A nugget from Tuesday’s NY Times piece on the “extremely anemic” state of Obamas’s fundraising:

Officials have also sketched out plans for Ms. Palin to do some 35 fund-raisers over the next two months. Mr. McCain will be dispatched for only four major fund-raisers: one on Monday night in Chicago, in which the party raised about $4 million; another next week in Miami, then Los Angeles and New York in October, finance officials said.

This is big — it allows McCain to focus on campaigning. Obama, because of his huge burn rate, will have to campaign and raise money at the same time. With the race as close as it is, that’s a problem, which is why Team Obama is resorting to gimmicks to raise additional cash. From the Sun-Times:

In order to squeeze money out of donors, Obama’s marketeers have created different kinds of events for niche contributors, including packaging together Obama foreign policy advisers Susan Rice, Richard Danzig and Greg Craig for briefings.
An Obama “policy lecture series” — a way to stroke donors is to make them feel they are real insiders — features Obama top adviser Valerie Jarrett on Monday in New York. She will give what is billed as an “insider’s view” of the campaign. The series is $10,000; one event goes for $2,500.
There is a “political and policy briefing and dinner with campaign leadership” Wednesday in Chicago featuring the Obama all-stars for those who raise or donate $10,000: campaign manager David Plouffe, senior adviser Peter Rouse, economic adviser Jason Furman, national field director Jon Carson, chief of staff Jim Messina, national finance director Julianna Smoot and economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.

I also have to believe that the more Team Obama has to focus on paying the bills, the better for McCain.