First former Democratic Congressman Jim Slattery was looking at a bid against incumbent Republican Senator Pat Roberts in Kansas, then he nearly got in, then he decided not to run, then he reconsidered, and then, just last month, he jumped in. And in less than two weeks, Slattery raised a very respectable amount of money for a Senate campaign in a state like Kansas.

Jim Slattery finally unveiled his campaign for the U.S. Senate on Saturday, telling a partisan audience that the time had come to end the "breathtaking incompetence" in Washington.

Slattery, a former six-term congressman from Topeka, decried the run-up to the war in Iraq, America's faulty health-care system, the failure to more aggressively address the environment, and runaway spending that he termed "generational robbery."

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Slattery, 59, is a late entry in the 2008 U.S. Senate sweepstakes and faces a formidable opponent in two-term incumbent Pat Roberts. Nearly half the state's voters are registered as Republicans, and they outnumber registered Democrats by about 322,000.

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Republicans hold 23 of the 34 Senate seats up for election this year. Democrats are targeting 17 of those seats, including Roberts' seat. The incumbent raised $522,024 in the year's first quarter and had about $3 million on hand as of March 31.

Slattery raised $288,000 in the 12 days after filing paperwork on March 19.

Slattery still has a lot of ground to make up, both in the head-to-head race (I'd imagine he trails by a fairly decent amount in polling, though I don't recall having seen any hard numbers any time so recently) as well as the race for cash. That said, raising $24,000 a day isn't a bad start.

What's more, for as red as Kansas is -- it hasn't sent a Democrat to the United States Senate since 1932 -- the state is actually trending towards the Democrats at this point. In November 2006, Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius easily won reelection, and Republican-turned-Democrat (since turned out of office) Paul Morrison easily defeated incumbent Republican Attorney General Phill Kline. Moreover, Democrats received 49.6 percent of the two-party congressional vote in the state in 2006, suggesting that voters are willing to vote Democrat on the federal level as well as the statewide level.

If you want to help put this race on the map, head over to the Jim Slattery for Senate website or Slattery's ActBlue page.