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The Gap Fest on speakerphone.

This is the Slate Daily podcast for Friday, July 6th, 2007.

I'm June Thomas. John Dickerson is in Aspen, Colorado at a hoity-toity

Ideas fest this week, so Emily Bazelon steps into host. Topics include the presidential

fundraising race, Scooter Libby's commuted sentence, and the terrorist incidents in London and Glasgow.

A word of apology for the sketchy sound quality at the beginning of the Gab Fest.

Miking the speakerphone and the humans was a bit of a challenge for an audio neophyte like me.

I promise that the sound improves a few minutes in. To introduce today's

discussion, here's Emily Bazelon. Welcome to Slate's Political Gab Fest. I'm Emily Bazelon. I'm here in

our lovely conference room with David Plotz, and John Dickerson is with us by phone in a very

amusing way, which I have to describe. We're micing the speakerphone so that he can join us by phone. It was the only way we could figure out how to do it. And it looks like those Dunesbury cartoons where, is it George Bush the first who is the little... Isn't it quail? It's quail, yes. It's quail, who's like the little non-existent bubble who's speaking. That's what this looks like. So hi, John. We're glad you're here.

Hi, I'm happy to be in a non-existent bubble more so than ever.

Where are you, John? I'm in my hotel room in Aspen, where I am at the Aspen Ideas Festival,

where hopefully I will get one. Do you have to supply an idea to get invited to the Aspen Ideas Festival?

Or do you just consume them? I have a vast broadband strategy that people are really warming to. Lots of venture capital money flowing your way. Exactly. And my carbon footprint is very small. I don't know about that because you had to fly out there. That's true. But net net, it's still dirty. Did they pick you up in a Prius at the air? It was going to go 100 miles an hour. Oh, that was the joke I was going to make. John, we're going to start off with you today. We have all these figures coming in about how much money the different political candidates have raised. We have the Republicans raising less money than the Democrats. We have Hillary Clinton raising less money than Barack Obama. We have John McCain raising really not enough money at all. Tell us what we're supposed to make of all of this.

Well, I think the first thing you're supposed to make is Obama, Obama. If you're an Obama supporter, you can have a debate with your friends about whether it's better news that he raised the most money in the second quarter or whether he raised it from the largest number of people.

He said 258,000 people give him donations, which is an extraordinary number, which normally

people think of this money-raising business as a silly kind of inside the beltway measure.

And in some ways it might be, but the fact that he could raise it from so very many people

is another way in which we know, in addition to the events he's having when 20,000 people show up,

...