The long-awaited September fundraising totals for Barack Obama are finally out, and they vastly exceeded very high expectations. Could his campaign actually pull in $100 million in a single month, we all wondered as rumors swirled? Yeah, that and more: around $150 million, more than doubling the record $67 million he collected in August. The Obama campaign is now at around $600 million for the cycle, from more than three million individual donors. Following the long-established pattern of small donor domination, the average contribution to Obama among 632,000 first-time givers in September was under $100.

Add in the $50 million or so raised by the Democratic National Committee in September, and you can understand why Democrats are now heavily outspending Republicans on paid advertising, aside from hard-to-quantify but definitely superior investments in field operations.

The weird thing is that Obama's September fundraising completely obscured what would have otherwise been an astonishing month for the Republican National Committee, which took in $66 million in September. With McCain himself limited to $84 million in public funds for the entire post-Convention period ($32 million of that was spent in September), there's zero doubt that Obama will have a sizable advantage down the stretch.