Fraken- can he raise enought money?

Al Franken Faces Deep-Pocketed Opponent( this was on news max www.newsmax.com)

Liberal comedian Al Franken is in for a tough battle as he seeks the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat from Minnesota now that high-powered lawyer Mike Ciresi has thrown his hat into the ring.

Ciresi is best known for a multibillion-dollar settlement he engineered with the tobacco industry. He also served as counsel to the government of India against Union Carbide over the Bhopal catastrophe, and represented women rendered infertile by the Copper 7 IUD.
The trial attorney ran for the Senate in 2000 as a self-described progressive moderate, but lost the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party primary to Mark Dayton in a four-way race.
Ciresi spent nearly $5 million of his own money and raised another $1 million for the primary race. He has said he’s not planning on self-funding his new campaign, but he’s not ruling it out, according to the Washington, D.C.-based publication The Hill.

For his part, Franken — who recently left the Air America radio network — raised more than $1 million for his Midwest Values political action committee in the last cycle, “showing the fund-raising prowess needed to run in one of the marquee races in the nation,” the Hill reports.
David Schultz, a political expert at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., told The Hill: “What you have is probably the two best-financed candidates who have entered early and probably will scare off just about everybody else at this point.”

Ciresi and Franken are targeting the Senate seat now held by Republican Norm Coleman, who narrowly won in 2002 after Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash.

What are your thoughts do you think Franken will be the democrats choose to run against Coleman? Can Franken raise enought money to compete with others that will enter the race? Or is this articale just a bunch of smoke? Lets have some converstation about it.