Something I’ve been quietly brooding on for months is is a hunch that if Obama gets the nomination he will be assassinated by one of the thousands of nutters loose in the US — cut down just as JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were in their time. Now I find out that I’m not the only one with these worries. Here’s an excerpt from a piece in today’s NYT:

DALLAS — There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?

In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.”

Fascinating New York Times piece about Hillary Clinton’s campaign spending.

“We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,” said a prominent New York donor. “So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.”

The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.

The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.

The article identifies two basic problems: Clinton’s cash flow projections were based on the assumption that by Iowa the race would be efffectively over; and over-reliance on smallish numbers of large donors (who will be hard to tap again if they perceive the campaign to be badly managed) as compared with the legions of small donors who support Obama and are likely to keep on giving as the campaign continues.

The details of what Clinton spent money on are fascinating. For example:

As part of their get-out-the-vote effort in Iowa, the campaign came up with a plan to have a local supermarket deliver sandwich platters to pre-caucus parties. It spent more than $95,384 on Jan. 1 at Hy-Vee Inc., a local grocery chain in West Des Moines, Iowa, in addition to buying loads of snow shovels to clear the walks for caucusgoers.

And,in the event, it didn’t snow! Wonder what they will get for the shovels on eBay.

Footnote: Clinton came third in Iowa.