Mrs Clinton's haul is three times the previous record for this stage in the campaign; the primary candidates have collectively raised well over $100m; and the leading candidates are on track to raise $100m apiece for the primary election alone. But the announcement also raised some intriguing questions.

The most intriguing of all is how much of a front-runner is Mrs Clinton? One reason why the Clinton campaign was so speedy to release its figure—the official deadline is April 15th—is that it wants to prove that there is no real alternative. The Clinton campaign took the trouble to leak the figure to Matt Drudge, a right-wing internet journalist who broke the news of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The campaign boosted the figure by including $10m that Mrs Clinton has transferred from her Senate campaign account to her presidential war chest.

But the strategy backfired. Mrs Clinton has a huge advantage when it comes to fund-raising: she is the wife of a former president, a senator for one of the richest states in the country and the heir to the Clinton machine. Her campaign manager, Terry McAuliffe, was Bill Clinton's chief fund-raiser; her husband has been busy shaking the money trees as hard as he can. But somehow none of this seems to have translated into a convincing victory in the money primary.

The Barack Obama campaign has yet to release its official figures. But it estimates that it has raised $20m, an astonishing figure for somebody who was not so long ago struggling to pay off a $20,000 debt after an unsuccessful foray into national politics in 2000, and who was elected to the Senate only in 2004. Campaigners also point out that Mr Obama has received donations from 83,000 people compared with Mrs Clinton's 50,000. Even John Edwards, very much the third in the race, raised $14m. Mrs Clinton will certainly not enjoy the towering financial advantage that George Bush enjoyed in 2000, when “rangers” and “pioneers” competed to stuff cash into his pockets.

The big surprise came on the right. Mitt Romney leapt to the head of the Republican pack by raising $21m, $6m more than his nearest rival, Rudy Giuliani; he also reinforced his lead by lending his campaign a further $2.35m from his own deep pockets. This will be enough to guarantee him a second look—not least because John McCain only managed to raise $12.5m. Mr McCain's staff blamed his poor performance on the fact that he does not like fund-raising (last weekend found him strolling through a Baghdad market accompanied by nothing more than a hundred American troops, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships). But such a poor showing for a big name suggests that the former navy man's campaign may be holed beneath the waterline.

How much money matters is not exactly clear. Money gives some sense of the strength of a candidate's support. It also provides the wherewithal to employ the best brains in the political business. The money primary proves that the Democratic field is divided into two tiers: the Big Three and the rest. Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, raised $6m; Christopher Dodd, a senator from Connecticut, raised $4m; and Joe Biden, a senator for Delaware, raised about the same.

Money is not a guarantee of success nor is lack of it a guarantee of failure. Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes have both proved that truckloads of money do not necessarily translate into political momentum. And Bill Clinton proved that you can win the presidency without being the big money candidate. Howard Dean has gone one better and proved both that you can succeed without money and fail with it. He came from nowhere to dominate the money primary in 2004. But his $40m treasure chest did not prevent him from imploding during the Iowa primaries.

But one thing is becoming clear: the publicly-funded system, which was put in place after Watergate, is on its last legs. All the top candidates are preparing to reject public money, along with its attendant spending limits. Privatisation, it seems, is the way of the future.