Several polls were released today regarding the upcoming presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  According to Insider Advantage, Clinton leads Obama 47% - 43%.  The Belo Texas Tracking Poll has the race a statistical dead heat with Clinton leading Obama 46% - 45%.  However, a People Calling People Survey has Obama leading 40% - 33%.  A figure that has to please the Clinton camp is that according to the PCP Survey, Clinton edged Obama in early voting 41% - 38%.

On the money front, Clinton announced that she raised $35 million in February - a huge number.  However, Obama is expected to announce in the next day or so that his campaign raised more than $50 million - a monster number.  You can tell from the ad buys that it was a good month for Obama.  According to First Read, “Watching local TV here in Ohio, it feels like Obama has a 4-to-1 advantage — with SEIU, UFCW and Obama just blitzing the airwaves compared with Clinton. It’s happening in all four states. In fact, per TV ad expert Evan Tracey, Obama has outspent Clinton $23 million to $14 million in the last 30 days.”

When asked about Obama’s TV buys, Clinton ad chief Mandy Grunwald replied, “They’re trying to crush us.”

Several key Clinton supporters, including Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, said that winning Texas was critical to her campaign moving forward.  They’re both echoing the words of Bill Clinton who remarked that she must win both Texas and Ohio to keep her campaign viable.

Karen Tumulty of Time, writing a piece on Bill Clinton, addresses the issue “political malpractice” committed by the Clinton campaign.  “But he is appalled, friends and aides say, by what he has privately described as “political malpractice” by Hillary’s campaign. It spent money with abandon in the earliest primaries and assumed that the race would not last past Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5 — and failed to prepare for any of the states that followed. Two weeks before the Texas primary, Bill Clinton telephoned Waco insurance mogul and philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, a friend and backer since the 1970s. Rapoport told Clinton that this was the first contact he had had from anyone on the campaign. “He was madder than mad,” Rapoport says. “He was right. There was so much we could have done, but we never heard from anyone at headquarters.”"

According to Anne Kornblut and Shaighlah Murray of The Washington Post, Clinton is pouring all of her resources into the March 4th states.