Democratic Tide on The Rise

Virginia this week when two prominent Republicans, Vincent Callahan, former chairman of the state House Appropriations Committee, and John Chichester, former state Senate president, endorsed Democrat Mark Warner for the U.S. Senate. Callahan said he was "extremely distressed" by the condition of Virginia's GOP, adding that it risked becoming "a minority debating society."

Other signs of the party shift include the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll's finding that voters preferred a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress, 52 percent to 33 percent, even though 79 percent disapproved of Congress itself.

Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant, says that given the Democrats' advantages and Obama's triumph in the primaries, this moment "should be one of Obama's high-water marks," but that Obama has yet to build a large lead over McCain.

Castellanos acknowledges that to win back the ground his party has lost, it needs a new approach to governing and cannot simply continue to run against government. "We have trapped ourselves in this world where we believe we either have to be faithful to our principles, or we have to govern," he said. "It's a recipe for not governing." That is the trap McCain needs to escape.

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