End of Battle Centers on Turf Bush Carried.

100,000 people turned out to hear Obama speak in Denver. As the campaign begins to draw to a close Obama is saying that he is going to turn his attention to how to unify the country after a difficult and long election.

With optimism brimming in Democratic circles, Mr. Obama will present on Monday what aides described as a summing-up speech for his campaign in Canton, Ohio, reprising the themes he first presented in February 2007, when he began his campaign for the presidency.

From here on out, Mr. Obama’s aides said, attacks on Mr. McCain will be joined by an emphasis on broader and less partisan themes, like the need to unify the country after a difficult election.

Both Obama and McCain will spend the remainder of the campaign in states where George Bush won last time which, in and of itself, says a lot about how far Obama has cut into McCain's backyard.

Mr. McCain has settled on Pennsylvania as the one state that Democrats won in 2004 where he has a decent chance of winning, a view not shared by Mr. Obama’s advisers.

I think McCain's Pennsylvania gamble is simply insanity. It is based on the fact that Hillary did much better than Obama there when the two of them were battling for the Democratic nomination, but that's a very different thing from asking them to vote for a Republican, so I think McCain is simply wasting his time on that front.

Obama is making large inroads into Republican territory and McCain's options are seeming more limited with each day that passes.

As Mr. Obama uses his money and political organization to try expand the political map, Mr. McCain is being forced to shore up support in states like Indiana and North Carolina that have not been contested for decades. His decision to campaign on Sunday in Iowa, a day after Ms. Palin campaigned there, was questioned even by Republicans who noted polls that showed Mr. Obama pulling away there. But it reflected how few options the campaign really has, as poll after poll suggests that Mr. Obama is solidifying his position.

Mr. McCain has found relatively small crowds — particularly compared with those that are turning out for Mr. Obama — even as he has campaigned in battleground states.

This is not surprising as McCain has continued to hit points which appear to have no electoral punch, from Ayers to "spreading the wealth", and yet he keeps hitting these same points and imagining that they are suddenly going to have traction.

“We feel good that when people hear the message about spreading the wealth versus raising taxes , they respond,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser. “It’s just a matter of whether, given Obama’s saturation paid advertising, we can get the message out there.”

Thatcher showed this level of stupidity when she insisted on pushing forward with the poll tax, which eventually cost her her premiership. She continued to believe that all she had to do was get the message out there and people would see her point. This ignored the fact that everyone understood her message perfectly well but that we fervently disagreed.

McCain finds himself in the same place. People know that Obama is going to increase taxation on people earning over $250,000 and that everyone else will get a tax cut. He achieves nothing by telling people something which they already know and expecting them to suddenly be outraged by it.

So, as we enter the final stretch, Obama will start to look for ways to unite the country around his presidency and McCain will talk about taxation.

There are many reasons as to why McCain's campaign has been as ineffective as it has. But one of the main reasons, as even Bill Kristol pointed out, is that they keep doing things even after they have been shown not to work. And Obama, "spreading the wealth around", is a case in point.

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Tags: Obama, McCain, US election 2008