Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign just announced his second quick campaign swing through the Twin Cities, following up his drop-by to a St. Paul diner early last month.

The Republican frontrunner will appear at Peter’s Grill in downtown Minneapolis at 9:45 a.m. Thursday to, in the words of his campaign staff “meet with local residents.”

Well, that certainly didn’t take very long.

Just a week after the purveyors of the conventional wisdom declared, once and for all, the inevitability of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee (a development noted over at the Big Question), the punditocracy’s inevitable course correction is already well underway.

In rapid succession, Time, the Politico and the Liberal Bigfeet of the New York Times’ op-ed page dumped cold water on the notion, citing everything from Clinton’s Bionic Woman persona to the fact that more than anything else, the Media Elite loves covering a knockdown, dragout contest.

Here’s Joe Klein’s take. Here’s the Politico’s. Over at the Times, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd took turns at picking Clinton to pieces.

P.S. It’s not just a Democratic parlor game. Something similar has been happening to Rudy Giuliani, long the apparently prohibitive frontrunner on the Republican’s side. The most recent puncture wound was inflicted by New York Magazine, long a Giuliani tormentor. And the Times piled on with its own version, too.

This week, forget for a moment the poll numbers and follow the dollar signs. Even before the third-quarter campaign fundraising deadline passed at midnight Sunday, the presidential campaigns were furiously spinning forward to put the best face on the size of the piles of cash they (and/or their rivals) were going to report to the Federal Election Commission.

On the Democratic side, both the Obama and Clinton campaigns were playing the reverse expectation game, each saying they expected to underperform their chief rival. It will be interesting to see if Hillary Clinton has, indeed, tapped out with her biggest donors as many analysts said after the second quarter ended. An equally intriguing question about Barack Obama: Was he able to continue his record-breaking fundraising pace during the past three months, a period when he plateaued in the polls? Rounding out the party’s top tier, was John Edwards’ announcement last week that he would accept an estimated $10 million in public financing an acknowledgment that his fundraising had stalled. And will any of the second-tier Democratic candidates get a lift from better-than-expected numbers.

As for the Republicans, this will be the first real test of Fred Thompson’s fundraising heft, since it’s the first quarter he’s actually been in the race. Although Mitt Romney had been the party’s top money-raiser during the first six months of the year, that was accomplished only through an infusion of millions of bucks from his own wallet. How will he and Rudy Giuliani fare? And John McCain is in the same boat as Edwards, expected to go to the public-financing well to replenish his less-than-steller fundraising.

If you’re not satisfied with the spin of the the pundits and campaign operatives on the current state of the money race, you can look at the raw figures yourself and poke around to your heart’s content here.

Update: For what it’s worth, Obama’s campaign was the first out of the e-mailbox at midday Monday, with these detailed bragging rights: Third quarter totals:• Primary dollars raised: at least $19 million