Blunt spends evening dialing for dollars

With Missouri's government running so smoothly, Governor Matt Blunt took time out from his official state duties today to man a phone bank for the just-announced presidential candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
With his eyes clearly on anything other than a future as Missouri governor, Blunt used his well-documented ability to rake in campaign dollars to aid his fellow governor.
The New York Times offered this account of Gov. Romney's fundraising operation:

That is what made what happened here early Monday morning striking. Over 400 people, including corporate executives, governors, wealthy Republican donors and party operatives, gathered around telephones and computer screens stretched out over a huge convention center room for a day of public fund-raising on behalf of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who created a presidential exploratory committee last week. Television camera crews and reporters circled the room as Mr. Romney’s aides provided a running tally of how much had been raised.

The role of Gov. Blunt, who is pictured with Gov. Romney and his wife, Ann, in the Boston Globe photo that accompanies this post, is detailed in this paragraph:

Mr. Romney’s supporters came armed with lists of friends and, in the case of politicians, their own contributors. A lot of internal planning had gone into the day, so the recipients of calls asking for donations of $2,100, the legal limit, were not surprised. And Mr. Romney was certainly not taking any chances. When it came time for him to make a fund-raising call, piped over the loudspeaker and in front of a crush of cameras, he chose to call his older sister, Lynn Keenan, at her home outside Detroit. Still the image of, say, the governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, sitting at one table, and the head of a major corporation dialing for dollars was certainly unusual.

Certainly, Gov. Blunt had a large list of campaign contributors he was able to call.