Rathje has $58 in the bank; Harkin has $3.4 mil

By JANE NORMAN • REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU • February 8, 2008

Washington, D.C. – The only Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Iowa who’s filed with Federal Election Commission reports he has $58.07 cash in the bank as the election year begins.

Steve Rathje, a Cedar Rapids businessman, is challenging incumbent Sen. Tom Harkin, a Cumming Democrat.

Rathje, in a year-end report to the FEC, said he raised about $16,000 from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, and total receipts through 2007 of about $108,000.


He reported close to $20,000 in debt, all of it loans he has made to his own campaign.

Harkin in his report to the FEC said he raised $757,000 during the last three months of the year and $3.9 million in 2007. He said he has $3.4 million cash in the bank.

According to an analysis on CQ Moneyline, a campaign finance Web site, Harkin raised about 27 percent of his 2007 contributions from political action committees and the rest from individual contributors.

He reported more than $1 million from PACs during the year.

PACs that gave money to Harkin in the last quarter of the year represented labor unions, agriculture interests, health groups and businesses.

Harkin is the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee as well as the chairman of an appropriations subcommittee that allocates federal spending on labor, health, education and human services.

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"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
Franklin D. Roosevelt