Yes, they can pull defeat from victory if they keep it up, says Bob Herbert:
So what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with flamethrowers, gleefully trying to incinerate the prospects of the party’s leading candidate, Barack Obama. As Bill Clinton put it last month: “If a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.”
Senator Obama, for his part, seems to have lost sight of the unifying message that proved so compelling early in his campaign and has stumbled into weird cultural predicaments that have caused some people to rethink his candidacy.
While some of those predicaments raise legitimate concerns (his former pastor, his comments in San Francisco) and some do not (stupid questions about wearing a flag pin), he has allowed them to fester unnecessarily. The way for a candidate to eventually change the subject is to offer policy prescriptions so creative and compelling that they generate excitement among the electorate and can’t be ignored by the press. ...
That raucous laughter you hear in the background is coming from the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, President Bush and Senator McCain. They can’t believe their good fortune.
The issues still favor the Democrats. More and more Americans are losing their jobs, and many of those still employed are working fewer hours and cashing smaller paychecks. Vacation plans are being curtailed because of declining family income and sky-high gasoline prices. The value of the family home is eroding.
Instead of capitalizing on the political advantages presented by these issues, the Democrats, with their increasingly small-minded approach to this election, are squandering them.
There was always going to be resistance in the U.S. to putting a black person or a woman of any color in the White House. To overcome that built-in resistance, three things are crucially important: new voters have to be brought into the process; the nominee must have an exciting and compelling message; and the party has to be extraordinarily unified behind its standard-bearer.
John McCain, meanwhile, is looking to go wide:
ARLINGTON, Va. — Senator John McCain’s political advisers said Friday that they believed his potential appeal to independents could make him competitive in up to two dozen tossup states, twice as many as Republicans seriously contested in the 2004 presidential race.
The campaign is working to expand Mr. McCain’s electoral map by employing an unusual, decentralized structure in which it will dispatch 11 regional campaign managers across the country, assigning some to traditional closely fought states like Ohio and Florida, others to states they hope to pick up, like Minnesota, and a couple to some less common targets for Republicans, including New Jersey.
The McCain campaign, which won the primaries on a shoestring budget, is staffing up now that he is the presumptive Republican nominee. It has around 150 people on its payroll, up from less than 100 last month, and has beefed up its communications division, added a speech writer and brought on board a team of pollsters. And it is working to overcome its fund-raising disadvantage by working in tandem with the better-financed Republican National Committee.