The Clinton camp had to sheepishly stop doing their end zone victory dance and pretend, instead, that this was all part of some cunning, long-term plan.

Not only that, but Obama's camp claimed 100,000 individual donors, to Clinton's 50,000. It is a fact of post-McCain-Feingold life that an individual can write a check to a candidate for Federal office for as much as $2,300. But once you have written that check, you can't give any more.

If you are Obama, and the huge proportion of your contributors have given about $100, you can go back to those donors 22 more times.

At some point, everyone will catch their collective breath and realize that perhaps the amount of money raised in the first quarter of the year before the election is actually going to be held, may not mean very much.

We've talked about this before, but it bears repeating now: For political professionals, the only thing that matters - whether it is some news item, or debate outcome, or new ad, or fundraising numbers - is: Does it move the numbers?

We will know pretty quickly how much of a polling bounce Obama gets out of the first quarter fundraising numbers, but we will not know for about nine more months whether the totals released last week will have mattered to caucus goers in Iowa or voters in New Hampshire.

Waves of conventional wisdom have a habit of crashing ashore with great fanfare then, like real waves, quietly washing back out to sea to disappear as if they had never happened at all.

On a the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to a useful webpage in tracking political money; a Mullfoto showing the dangers of GLOBAL WARMING! And a Catchy Caption of the day which will make you … Well, I'm not certain what it will make you do.