Senator John Ensign's fundraising

TPM is reporting that Senator John Ensign's fund-raising has taken a substantial hit--in fact, he has only raised $50 since January, in the form of two $25 checks from one contributor (click here to read the story). His PAC has raised $0. In an update, a TPM reporter spoke to Ensign's sole supporter, a retired Newark, New Jersey policeman.

"He did some bad things with his personal life," Robert Donald, a Las Vegas retiree, told TPMmuckraker. "But as a senator, he's doing the right thing. He votes the right way."He added: "He's back with his family, so I don't see any problems."Besides, Donald said, "all men are dogs, the way I look at it."

The LA Times blog Top of the Ticket adds more.In another life, I was an acquiring editor for a number of book clubs. Once in a while, I would choose a title that almost none of our customers seemed to want. Usually it would be a book that I particularly liked. I'd stare at the sales figures in disbelief, trying to account for the vagaries of taste. Sometimes it would be brilliantly reviewed; sometimes it would even be selling in the trade. But for whatever reason--the demographics of our membership, my misreading of the zeitgeist--it had fallen completely flat in our market.A conspiratorially minded person might suppose that Ensign's fundraising machine has been sabotaged--by Democrats or Feminists or one or another Puritan faction within his own party (maybe the C Street Family has put out a political hit on him).But as bad as things are for Ensign, I suspect this newest travail is evidence that he's already thrown in the towel. It's not so much that he's being rebuffed, but rather that he's stopped even asking. The truth might be that he didn't have much personal capital to draw on even before the scandal; that his constituents genuinely hate him.All but one of them, that is.