Although Biden was in Denver for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, he encouraged locals to support Bennet as well — but it appears Bennet is doing just fine on his own in that department. Bennet racked up $1.1 million in individual contributions to his 2010 campaign, outraising most of his Senate colleagues in the first quarter of 2009. The Denver Post notes this week that he came in fifth in the entire Senate for total fundraising last quarter, even beating out big household names like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).

How does he do it?

Bennet — who owes his seat to President Obama’s selection of Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) for secretary of the interior — is new to politics but his fundraising ability indicates he may be a natural. The Washington Post ran a rather endearing front-page feature story about Bennet early this year, describing how he was sleeping on his mom’s couch in D.C.’s Woodley Park neighborhood and running around town with a notepad containing advice and phone numbers as he struggles to adjust to life as a senator.

The Denver Post notes that $100,000 in individual contributions poured into Bennet’s campaign pockets from the D.C. area this year, so the feature probably didn’t hurt.

But Bennet’s fundraising prowess pales next to fellow appointee Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) the top fundraiser in the Senate during the first quarter of 2009. Gillibrand — who was appointed to fill Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vacated seat. Gillibrand raised $2.3 million of her own last quarter, which along with a phone call from Obama, may have helped convince Rep. Steve Israel, (D-N.Y.), to abandon thoughts of challenging her.

In contrast, Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) — in addition to a host of other problems stemming from his appointment by disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich — has only $845 in cash on hand. Anytime my own bank account outshines an elected official’s campaign fund, it’s probably not good news.

And the guy who took Biden’s old seat? Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), Biden’s former chief-of-staff — who some suspect is “keeping the seat warm” until Biden’s son, Beau, can run — says he has no interest in running in 2010, a point underscored by the fact that he has no FEC record because he hasn’t raised a dime.

“Terry McAuliffe is slipperier than an eel in olive oil,” Nader said in an interview.

He said McAuliffe, who was the Democratic National Committee chairman at the time, had offered Nader’s campaign an unspecified amount of money, believed to be party funds, to spend in 31 states in exchange for an agreement to withdraw from 19 battleground states where he could potentially hurt Democrat John Kerry.

Perhaps more shockingly, McAuliffe’s not denying it. He’s not exactly admitting it, either — but he’s certainly not calling Nader a liar.

In fact, McAuliffe aides are even attempting to spin this in his favor, basically saying that any effort he made to thwart Nader and prevent the re-election of George W. Bush might actually play well with party loyalists.

In a statement to The Post, spokeswoman Liz Smith said McAuliffe “was concerned that Ralph Nader would cost John Kerry the election as he did Al Gore in 2000 and give us another four years of George W. Bush.” She then jabbed Nader, saying it appears he “misses seeing his name in the press.”

The problem is, Ralph Nader doesn’t need to find a new project to make him relevant these days — with corporate bailouts and credit card reform dominating the public psyche right now, a man who built his reputation on consumer advocacy should be as happy as a pig in mud. And he is busy critiquing everything from the government-led restructuring of General Motors to the handling of swine flu.

The Daily Beast points out that Nader was willing to take cash from wealthy Republicans trying to siphon votes from Democrats in that same election. He told The Post, however, that he turned down McAuliffe’s offer.

So why talk now, five years after the fact? The disclosure of the alleged bribe — which comes less than two weeks before Virginia’s June 9 Democratic gubernatorial primary — will apparently be played up in an upcoming book written by a former Nader campaign manager. Today’s news will likely drive up interest in that project, which is scheduled for release the week after the primary.

Whitman is hosting a townhall meeting in Fresno today — and you know McCain can’t resist a good townhall. She has formed an exploratory committee for the race but has not officially announced her candidacy yet. Whitman would be trading her professional experience with eBay, Procter & Gamble and Disney to fill the shoes of current Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is prohibited from seeking a third-term in office.

Other potential Republican candidates include former Rep. Tom Campbell and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, while San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, Gavin Newsom — known for backing gay marriage and posing in Harper’s Bazaar on rugs with his ex-wife — is also running for governor.

Whitman hopes to capitalize on female support — she rolled out a group called MEGa WOMEN to help her win. The group aims to bring women “from the worlds of politics, education, business, philanthropy and the arts” to participate in interactive forums and town hall discussions and fix California‘s economic woes.

Her campaign Website notes that she helped eBay grow from “a company with 30 employees and a little over $4 million in revenue” to more than 15,000 employees and nearly $8 billion in revenue, in just ten years.

Why’s McCain getting in on the action? Whitman was a national co-chair of  his 2008 presidential campaign. Plus, let’s not forget where McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, said she placed her state-owned private jet up for auction.

The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent reports that Sestak told him he wants to challenge newly minted Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter in the 2010 party primary, even if the White House begs him to stay out of the race.

He’ll have his work cut out for him, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll results released today. The survey says … Specter leads Sestak by 30 points in the primary at this time, and roughly 75 percent of voters don’t know enough about Sestak to even have an opinion on him.

Of course, the more people learn about Sestak the more they could grow to love him … but it takes money to introduce yourself to Pennsylvania voters through TV ads and mailers — and as we mentioned yesterday, Specter is doing the grunt work that will make him, not Sestak, the recipient of Democratic National Committee cash and ad buys.

Former Club for Growth President Pat Toomey  — the man who scared Specter from the Republican Party — still trails Specter by nine points, 46-37 percent, according to Quinnipiac, but that’s a big gain compared to the 20 point deficit he faced earlier this month.

Sen. Arlen Specter’s numbers have slipped since the controversy that followed his switch to the Democratic Party, but he’s still better off than he would have been if he stayed a Republican and faced a tough primary challenge from former Rep. Pat Toomey, said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Clearly. The poll’s most interesting finding, I think, is that very few people surveyed (nine percent) said Specter was “too conservative,” while 30 percent found him “too liberal” — most of whom identified as Republicans.  One in four people, however, who responded that way were Independents, while eight percent of Democrats said Specter was too liberal.

Still, to go from being a Republican senator to having nearly one-in-three voters say you’re too liberal within a month seems to validate the GOP argument that Specter didn’t really fit in with the other kids.

To accomplish this, I support many budget reform measures, including:

• Passing a strong balanced budget constitutional amendment.
• Passing a constitutional amendment to give the President the line-item veto.
• Bucking the Appropriations Committee Leadership and voting against appropriations bills which are bloated and fiscally irresponsible.
• Attacking government waste by consolidating duplicative programs.
• Voting for a federal budget that cuts the deficit in half in five years.

But Vitter has never equated fiscal discipline with earmark restraint.

This spring, The Hill covered Vitter’s earmark addiction after the Senator railed against the size of the 2009 spending bill.

“I have strongly supported fundamental spending reform, including complete openness and transparency and significantly lower budget number,” Vitter told The Hill in a statement. “As I do that, though, I am proud to stand by my specific funding requests for critical transportation, law enforcement and hurricane recovery needs.”

In next year’s bill, Vitter and Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (who sought $3.8 million in earmarks herself) both requested multiple projects related to the Army Corps of Engineers and transportation infrastructure.

The Times-Picayune reminds us that nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense ranked Landrieu third and Vitter fifth among senators inserting earmarks in last year’s omnibus spending measure. In the 2009 bill, Louisiana received $233 million for 192 projects –  eighth among all states in the amount of earmarked funds received.

This year, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees moved to increase earmark transparency by requiring members of Congress to post their earmark requests somewhere on their Websites and justify why taxpayer money should be spent on the projects, in theory to force members of Congress to think about how these requests appear to the public.

But it’s tough to shame somebody with Vitter’s background into caring about about how things appear to the public.

Yesterday he signed a budget that did just that.

Florida’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year includes about $2 billion in tax and fee increases, including a $1 per-pack hike in the cigarette tax.

Crist is still trying to have his cake and eat it too, claiming that he still hasn’t supported a broad-based tax increase, since not everybody smokes — it is estimated that about 2 million Floridians smoke, or roughly one in five residents over 18.

The Americans for Tax Reform pledge for congressional candidates requires signers to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses … and oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”

Crist could get off on a technicality here since he’s not in Congress and the budget doesn’t raise income taxes. But wait, he did sign a different ATR pledge — one for governors — that requires signatories commit to “oppose and veto any and all efforts to increase taxes.”

Last month, ATR jumped all over Florida House leaders who signed the pledge and allowed the state budget to include tax increases.

Responsible legislators don’t raise taxes on their constituents, especially when they can least afford it.  Responsible people look to solve problems (cutting excessive spending), rather than looking to patch them with taxes on a declining source of revenue (cigarette taxes).

The Orlando Sentinel notes Crist invokes conservative demigod Ronald Reagan in his defense:

I view it more as a health issue than a tax issue … Ronald Reagan used to say if you want to kill something, tax it. It wouldn’t be bad if we killed smoking. It would save a lot of lives.

Crist might want to avoid comparisons to Reagan, lest Florida voters draw a connection to his vice president, George H.W. Bush, and the “Read my lips: No new taxes” debacle.

Update: Americans for Tax Reform spokesman Adam Radman emails the following statement:

[W]ith the signing of these bills, Crist has broken his Pledge at the state level. We’re disappointed Crist has broken his state pledge which he took to oppose all tax increases of whatever kind. He’s right though about the Federal pledge–it applies only to Federal income taxes. We’re hoping he’ll recommit himself to Florida taxpayers and do better with his Federal pledge than he has with his state Pledge.

Everybody’s picking sides: The Washington Post endorsed State Sen. Creigh Deeds, who represents a rural district; the majority of the state Democratic Party steering committee backs former state lawmaker Brian Moran; and rapper Biz Markie and Clinton support former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

In some ways, the Virginia campaign mirrors this year’s the other gubernatorial race in New Jersey. In the Garden State, the drama hinges on whether Republican voters will choose a hard right-wing conservative or a relative moderate in the June 2 gubernatorial primary. In Virginia, we’ll see what sells these days with Democrats: a moderate from a rural area, a national party operative, or a guy who has tried to paint himself as the most liberal candidate of the three.

Ultimately, it’s obviously up to the voters to decide who’ll face Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell in the race for governor. The outcome of the June 9 Democratic primary, however, will likely show just how far left Virginia voters will go, and whether the Southern state that turned blue for President Obama, Gov. Tim Kaine and Sen. Mark Warner (a former governor) could continue to vote for Democrats in the forseeable future.

McAuliffe is trotting Clinton across the state and bragging about his connections and ability to create jobs,. Deeds argues that he doesn’t have the connections, but he understands the rural, significantly less-liberal majority of the state where people support gun rights and the death penalty. Finally, Moran has stepped out as the only candidate to vow to repeal a state constitutional ban on gay marriage and to decry offshore oil drilling.

As David Weigel recently reported, conservative bloggers and activists are stoking a rebellion among Republicans who are fed up with the National Republican Senatorial Committee‘s willingness to back so-called “liberal” candidates like Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter — who is now a Democrat, of course, but the NRSC had Specter’s back before he turned his back on them.

In the words of The Washington Examiner’s Editorial Page Editor Mark Tapscott:

The fact that just doesn’t register with Washington GOP establishmentarians is that the Tea Party Protests seen around the country in April were aimed as much against them as they were against the tax and spending policies of Obama and the Democratic Congress.

I covered one of those tea parties. I observed hundreds, possibly a thousand, people, brave driving rain in Annapolis, Md. last month in the biggest protest I’ve covered in the past year. People were angry and, unlike most rallies, they didn’t let the rain stop them from showing up or allowing the organizers to drone on for nearly an hour.

The NRSC’s endorsement of Crist has poured gas on the fire, as evidenced by yesterday’s call-to-action from Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of the conservative blog, RedState.com. Some Republicans were very happy with the campaign of Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, an unabashed conservative, to win the seat of retiring Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.).To those folks, Crist’s fatal flaws include his support for the economic stimulus package and the tax hikes that have occurred on his watch.

From Erickson:

Friends, the Republican establishment’s favoritism toward liberal candidates continues. The National Republican Senatorial Committee just officially endorsed tax-hiking, affirmative action-loving liberal Florida Gov. Charlie Crist over conservative rising star Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, rumors are flying that the NRSC might soon do likewise in several other states.

I am sick and tired of the GOP taking my money and telling me to shut up while they spend my money on pro-abortion, big-spending tax hikers.

Now it seems they’ve found a way to channel their wrath. Erickson’s letter directs dyed-in-the-wool conservatives to take their money and run from the Republican Party, and instead give it to The National Conservative Campaign Fund. The NCCF says it’s goal is to elect “as many bona fide conservatives as possible to Congress — conservatives who won’t abandon their principles once they get to Washington, and whose voting records will consistently favor limited government, lower taxes, a strong national defense, and the just interests of the United States.”

The NCCF site says 2 of 5 Senate candidates it backed were elected last year, as were 15 of 45 House candidates. Not a bad track record, buts the roughly $200,000 the group raised last year for 2008 candidates pales in comparison to the nearly $6 million the Republican National Committee raised last month alone.

If Erickson’s effort takes off however, will the GOP be able to win elections without the support of the conservative base?

He’ll be in good company: Jennifer Hudson, Earth, Wind and Fire and President Obama will also be among the luminati at the event. No word yet if Specter — who recently told Details.com he sings mostly “golden oldies” to his wife — will croon for the crowd too.

Concert tickets range in price from $1,000 to $2,500 — and if you want dinner, it’ll set you back $30,400 per couple.

DNC officials said they don’t like to comment on how much they expect to rake in at fundraisers, but Hotline On Call reported that it will likely take in between $3 million and $4 million tonight.

And as for Specter? He doesn’t get a cut from the evening, it’s just one of the things expected of Democrats in office who hope to eventually get a chunk of campaign cash from the party. He currently has about $6.7 million in cash on hand, according to his most recent campaign finance report from the end of March.

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), who told the Philadelphia Inquirer this week he is “leaning very much toward getting in” the Democratic primary race to challenge Specter, has  $3.5 million on hand.

Specter, who spent more than 40 years as a Republican, nabbed the Democratic primary endorsement of Obama, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) when he switched parties last month.

1) The New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns are this year’s only major races. There is nowhere else to get your political fix.

2) This primary will test the viability of Republican candidates who try to play to the party’s extremes, as opposed to taking a more centrist approach. The winner will try to unseat Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine in November (this race was previously considered a sure-thing for Corzine, but recent polls show he could be vulnerable).

In New Jersey’s  Republican primary, one of the contenders is the very conservative former small-town mayor, Steve Lonegan, up against relative moderate Chris Christie, a former U.S. attorney. Lonegan, whose campaign argued yesterday that Republicans should support him because the “liberal” media endorsed Christie, intends to lure voters by trotting out people like the anti-illegal immigration Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrest and ideas like a flat income tax rate of 2.9 percent to inspire the far-right.

Lonegan today accused Christie of ignoring the “illegal alien” problem because he only brought 13 cases against illegal immigrants in seven years as U.S. attorney. From a Lonegan campaign statement:

Chris Christie thinks illegal immigration is not a crime and his record as U.S. Attorney –virtually ignoring the problem–proves that’s his real position. As Governor, I will roll up [current Democratic Gov. Jon] Corzine’s red carpet for illegals and take back our state, before it’s too late.

Christie, who’s been bashed for having a foggy agenda and changing his abortion stance (he’s now pro-life), is expected to be endorsed Thursday by former GOP presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (who is no stranger to abortion flip-flopping himself). However, some suspect Romney made the last-minute pick to shore up Garden State support for a potential 2012 presidential campaign.

Lonegan also recently won the backing of another Republican who sought the presidential nomination last year: fellow tax foe, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

Although polls have long called Christie the favorite, recent reports note slight movement to the right by Christie — indicating he may be worried about the effectiveness of Lonegan’s strategy with some Republican primary voters.