With a burn rate of $42 million a month, Obama's campaign can just barely sustain its current levels of spending. And what's leftover may not be adequate to run the kind of campaign he needs to win. Just consider despite all the money he's raised, Obama has been outspent on television by 3 to 1 in the last two months. All the stagecraft and theatrics has come with a hefty cost.

Compared to the McCain campaign, Obama has spent three-and-a-half times as much on payroll and benefits, ten times on event staging, two-and-a-half times as much on travel and lodging, and three times as much on food and meetings. Despite being given free protection from the Secret Service, which has proven sufficient for other candidates, the Obama campaign has spent nearly $400,000 on outside security consulting, nearly all of it paid to a security firm that specializes in dangers emerging from "political instability, acts of terrorism, kidnapping, white collar crime, and cyber-attacks."

Although the Obama campaign has portrayed itself as "frugal" for making staffers take public transportation from O'Hare, FEC reports of the campaign's spending paint a very different picture. Obama's overhead is $10 million more per month than McCain's, and this is likely to increase substantially given his campaign's out of control spending and lofty plans for the general election.

Obama recently told reporters, "I've never been a big entourage guy. … And that takes some getting used to." Well, the size of Obama's campaign suggests he's gotten used to the idea very quickly. Before even locking up the nomination, Obama's paid staff was already in excess of 700 people. In the last month, Obama has hired dozens if not hundreds of staffers, and his National Field Coordinator said the campaign anticipates deploying more than 2,000 paid staffers to every state in the country. Sending 15 paid staffers to Texas might make a good sound bite, but politically speaking, it is flushing money down the toilet.