How soon is now?

From The Washington Post:

Presidential candidates are collecting contributions at a record-setting pace and are racing to load their schedules with fundraising events ahead of March 31, the campaign's cutoff for financial reports that will be filed next month.

The amounts that contenders can bring in will shape the narrative of the race for months to come -- potentially vaulting a candidate into the top tier -- and could spell an early exit for some.

Fundraising professionals say they expect the candidates to greatly exceed totals from previous cycles, perhaps by hundreds of millions of dollars. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), for example, mingled with about a thousand donors last night at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for her campaign's second million-dollar-plus fundraiser in three days.

It is not simply Clinton's outsize fundraising power driving the vacuum-cleaner mentality. A confluence of other factors -- including voter dissatisfaction with the Bush administration, wide-open fields in both parties, higher donation caps, and a rush by large states such as California and Texas to move their primaries to the front of the nominating process -- has compelled campaigns to establish virtually round-the-clock fundraising schedules, with candidates and surrogates participating in sometimes a dozen events or more in a day. Not a single day in March will pass without at least one 2008 contender personally making a major push for funds.

The result: More than a year and a half before the election, the collective field could match in a single quarter the nearly $100 million that George W. Bush raised during his record-breaking primary effort two presidential cycles ago.

"It's almost a geometric increase," said Michael E. Toner, who left his post as a member of the Federal Election Commission last week.

I was listening to Rush yesterday and a caller was asking him who he liked in the Republican primary race and he tried to answer with his regular mantra about how he isn't going to make up his mind this early. He ended up wailing in the most plaintive tone I've ever heard him use, "It's too soon, it's too soon!".

You can tell that he's really feeling some pressure.

However the person who really should be feeling the pressure is Fred Thompson. The fact is that the primary schedule has been advanced and shortened and the money raising is going on now at a rate not seen in any previous presidential election in the history of the republic.

Thompson says that he wants to wait "several months" to make his decision. He does not have nearly that much time. By the end of Spring Giuliani, who is raising money almost as fast as Mrs. Bill Clinton, will have an insurmountable cash advantage.

It has been suggested that Thompson is not really even considering a run for the White House this time around. That he only wants to generate buzz, for whatever reason.

If that is true then Thompson is beneath contempt. The issues facing this nation and the Republican Party are so serious, the need to find an actual conservative to stand up to the three RINOs currently rampaging across the political landscape, is so great that any alleged conservative who allows other conservatives to waste time and money and effort on him when he has no intention of running or intends to dither so long that any candidacy would have no hope of success deserves to be considered a traitor to the movement on the level of a John McCain.

If Thompson is doing this. If he is allowing and encouraging efforts to get him in the race, and thereby delaying the search for another viable candidate, for whatever reason whether to generate "buzz" or in an effort to secure the VP spot on Giuliani's ticket, then he is nothing but a miserable punk and deserves to be held in the same loathing and contempt as John McCain's wretched little lickspittle butt-boy Lindsey Graham.

However all of this is mere speculation. I retain - for now - my faith in Thompson as a decent man who will ultimately do the right thing. Which is get in the race in time to actually have a chance of winning, or bow out in time for a replacement to come forward.