It certainly wasn't as much as Barack Obama, but it did come close to Hillary Clinton's fundraising numbers in March, so things are getting a bit better on the financial front for presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

McCain's camp confirmed to various news organizations that he raised $15 million in March, not close to the $40 million for Obama, but within range of Clinton's $20 million that same month.

What's interesting is that McCain has supposedly decided to accept public financing for his general election bid.  That means he is going to be outraised big time by the Democratic nominee and will look for the Republican National Committee to pick up the slack.

Usually the Democrats are the ones that are short on money for November, but that may not be the case this time, especially if Obama is the nominee.

McCain would get over $80 million dollars to run his campaign, but he would have to adhere to certain spending and fundraising limits.  Remember, he was an advocate of campaign finance reform, so it makes sense on one level.

To make sure he isn't swamped by the Dems, the RNC would step up and hold a series of big dollar fundraising efforts (hard money, not soft, thank you) in order to keep McCain competitive.  One figure I saw mentioned last night was that the RNC would raise over $100 million to help McCain.

And don't forget there will be "shadowy" outsider groups as well that are certain to spend some big time change on this race for McCain and against him.

One story I see emerging out of this is that McCain and Obama agreed last year that if they were the nominees, they would go the public financing route in order to hold down the costs of the campaign.

Well, once Obama tasted the fruits of Primary and Caucus victories, the money started rolling in big time, $131 million in just the last three months in fact.  For now, it doesn't look like Obama is going to be on the public financing train.

Look for McCain to try to exploit that by saying his Democratic opponent is getting big money from special interests that are sure to skew his judgment.

Remember, McCain can run a pretty good race as The Candidate of Reform.

A story I saw on Monday said that no candidate has rejected the public funding for a presidential campaign since the post-Watergate reforms were enacted.  So then Obama would be the first to go that route.

The one risk for him would be that the RNC is still a much better fund raising operation than the DNC.

March was a good month for McCain.  He got to fine tune his message, raise lots of money and do events around the country without any pressure on him.  All the while, the Democrats were beating each other up.

You never know, that may go on for another month or two.