Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/candidates-spend-millions-in-race-for-white-house Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript With the Federal Election Commission's release of second quarter funding reports came questions about what the candidates actually do with the money this early in the race. A professor and a journalist dissect the expenditures of the 2008 presidential campaign. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. GWEN IFILL: If money is the mother's milk of politics, Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani are dairy farmers. As leaders in their respective parties' 2008 fundraising, each man has tens of millions of dollars in the bank. Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney are not far behind.But how is all that cash being spent? Senator Obama spent about half of the $33 million he raised last quarter, nearly $3 million of that on charter jets. Former New York Mayor Giuliani spent $11 million of the $18 million he raised, including nearly $1.5 million on political consultants.Other candidates far outspent what they were able to bring in. Romney spent $20 million but raised just $14 million. Nearly $5 million of that went to television ads in New Hampshire and Iowa. And Arizona Senator John McCain spent all of the $10 million he raised, much of it on staff salaries.Why so much money spent for so many so early? For that, we turn to Stephen Medvic, professor of government at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Hotline, National Journal's daily briefing on politics.So, Amy, why so much, so early? AMY WALTER, Editor-in-Chief, The Hotline: Well, I think we have an absolutely wide-open race on both sides. And as such, you're going to get a whole bunch of people trying to raise money to give themselves that advantage early on in this campaign.The other thing to remember, too, we've heard so much about the fact that this has been a pushed-up schedule, frontloading of these primaries. We have essentially a national primary by the time you get to February 5th. And what we're seeing now is candidates spending early, not just in the traditional states like Iowa and New Hampshire, but when you look a little bit closely at the filings here, somebody like Rudy Giuliani, for example, who sees Florida as very important to him — this is a primary now at the end of January — he's already spent about 11 percent of his total funds in that state, something that wouldn't have happened a few years ago.