From National Journal

POLITICAL CONNECTIONS The Cost Of Stalemate
By Ronald Brownstein, NationalJournal.com© National Journal Group Inc.Friday, March 28, 2008
John McCain will effectively begin his general election campaign next week. In the process, he will highlight the real cost of the Democrats' inability to end their primary campaign.
By focusing so relentlessly inward, the Democrats are providing McCain an open field to reintroduce himself.
The question that Democrats ask most is whether their party will unite this fall after the bruising struggle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. That's a legitimate concern but probably not the most urgent one for Democrats. The larger issue is whether the party can recover from squandering its opportunity to shape the general election debate before McCain does.
Next week, McCain will make his first systematic attempt to frame that debate. His campaign has arranged a weeklong tour to highlight arguably his greatest political asset: his compelling personal story as the son of a distinguished military family, a Navy flier, and a prisoner of war in Vietnam. On a sentimental journey, McCain will tour a Navy facility in Mississippi named for his grandfather, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and naval bases in Pensacola and Jacksonville, where he trained as a flier, led a flight squadron, and returned after being freed from captivity in Hanoi.
At each stop, aides say, McCain will talk about a value that shaped him, such as service or education, and how he would incorporate that principle into his presidency. "At each place we will speak to a value that John McCain took away from his life experience revolving around that place," a senior campaign adviser said. "We will tie past to present to future."
Later this spring, McCain plans to fill in his economic agenda, partly by visiting troubled rural and inner-city communities where he will deliver a conservative empowerment message reminiscent of that of former Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., who is now advising him.
If the past month is any guide, while McCain lays down these markers, Obama and Clinton will be gouging each other. In the past few days, Democrats have witnessed one prominent Obama supporter liken former President Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy and one prominent Clintonite liken New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to Judas (for endorsing Obama). The Clinton campaign says that Obama can't be trusted as commander-in-chief, and the Obama campaign says that Hillary Clinton can't be trusted, period. Each Democratic candidate is now providing so many lacerating quotes about the other that Republican ad-writers may not need to do much more this fall than cut and paste. Even more important, by focusing so relentlessly inward, the Democrats are providing McCain an open field to re-introduce himself.
This spring might have looked very different, as a new study of the candidates' finances from George Washington University's Campaign Finance Institute suggests. In February alone, Obama and Clinton collected a combined $90 million, dwarfing McCain's $11 million. Through his entire campaign, McCain has raised $66 million compared with Clinton's $174 million and Obama's $197 million. The disparity is even greater among small donors, who are rapidly becoming the critical engine of presidential financing. Obama and Clinton last month collected nearly $48 million in donations of $200 or less. For McCain the tally was just over $2 million. Every 30 hours, the two Democrats raised as much from small donors as McCain did all month.
If Democrats were now training this financial advantage on McCain rather than each other, they could be bombarding swing states with ads challenging his open-ended commitment to maintaining American troops in Iraq, or his March 25 speech rejecting new federal assistance for homeowners facing foreclosure. Because McCain ended February with nearly as much debt as cash, he would have struggled to respond. Democrats might have defined McCain before he could define himself -- as Bill Clinton did so devastatingly to Bob Dole in 1996. Instead, as the Democratic conflict escalates, Gallup this week found that a strikingly high percentage of Clinton backers (28 percent) and Obama voters (19 percent) say they will support McCain if the other Democrat wins.
Obama supporters, with understandable frustration, say that Clinton should do the delegate math and concede. But Obama couldn't expand his coalition enough to win Texas or Ohio, where he might have forced Clinton out, and he's trailing again in Pennsylvania, where he could again slam the door. Each candidate is contributing to the spring stalemate that may loom as the decisive missed opportunity if the fall turns chillier than Democrats expect.
-- Ronald Brownstein is the political director of Atlantic Media Co. and the author of "The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America." His weekly column, "Political Connections," focuses on the intersection of politics and policy. His e-mail address is rbrownstein@nationaljournal.com.
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