US:HILLARY CLINTON raised $10 million within 24 hours of winning Pennsylvania's primary this week, her campaign said yesterday as the New York senator campaigned in the next battleground state of Indiana.
Vastly outspent by Barack Obama in recent primaries, Mrs Clinton has been appealing for cash at every campaign stop in Indiana, which votes on May 6th.
Her campaign said that the $10 million came from more than 100,000 Internet donors, 80,000 of whom had never contributed before.
Mr Obama's campaign gave no details of fund-raising in the wake of the Pennsylvania result, but he started April with over $30 million more cash than Mrs Clinton.
Mr Obama has won twice as many states and has more pledged delegates than Mrs Clinton, but the former first lady claims that, after Pennsylvania, she is ahead in the total popular vote.
"I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anybody else. I am proud of that, because it's a very close race," she told a crowd in Indianapolis.
Mrs Clinton is only ahead, however, if votes cast in unauthorised primaries in Florida and Michigan are counted. None of the Democratic candidates campaigned in either state, and in Michigan Mrs Clinton's name was on the ballot but Mr Obama's was not. Leaving aside those two states, Mr Obama is ahead by 500,000 votes.
Campaigning in Indiana, he dismissed Mrs Clinton's claim about the popular vote as irrelevant.
"We have simply been playing by the rules throughout this process. We think that if, at the end, we end up having won twice as many states and having the most votes, then we should end up being the nominee," he said.
Mr Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has claimed that controversial remarks he made in sermons at his Chicago church were distorted for political purposes.
Mr Obama condemned the statements, which included a description of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as America's chickens coming home to roost and a claim that the US government invented HIV as a means of genocide against people of colour.
In an interview to be broadcast today on the Public Broadcasting Service, Rev Wright said the television networks that played clips from the sermons wanted to portray him as a fanatic.
"I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And, by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That's what they wanted to communicate," he said.
Mr Obama used a speech on race in Philadelphia to denounce his former pastor's remarks but Rev Wright said he was not offended by the senator's condemnation.
"He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. But they're two different worlds," he said. "I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia, where he had to respond to the soundbites, he responded as a politician."
Senator John McCain was in New Orleans yesterday, where he blamed President George Bush for the mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
"Never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled," he said. "There were unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications."
The McCain campaign also announced yesterday that it had asked that a Republican ad which linked North Carolina Democrats to Rev Wright should be withdrawn.