A COAKLEY WIN WILL BE EXCELLENT NEWS FOR JOHN McCAIN!

Oh, Christ -- in the Massachusetts Senate race, are we about to play another round of GOP Failure = Success?

... A Brown win remains improbable, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 in the state and that Ms. Coakley, the state's attorney general, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support.

But a tighter-than-expected margin in the closely watched race would still prompt soul-searching among Democrats nationally, since the outcome will be the first real barometer of whether problems facing the party will play out in tangible ways at the polls later this year.

"If I had to bet a week's salary," said Dennis Hale, a political science professor at Boston College, "I'd still bet it on Coakley. But this is going to be like in the military, where the bullet misses you but it still scares you to death."

Yup -- Bush becomes president in 2000 despite losing the popular vote by half a million votes and winning Florida only through mismarked ballots, voter caging, election-worker intimidation, and a partisan Supreme Court ... and he waltzes into the Oval Office as if he just won 49 states. And the Beltway accepts this as perfectly normal and appropriate. Whereas if Coakley wins this race by anything less than double digits, are we going to have idiot "soul-searching" Democrats babbling to reporters that it was a failure? And even if hack Democrats somehow refrain from shooting themselves in the foot this way, I guess it's clear now that the press and pundits are probably going to proclaim a single-digit win a loss. Sigh.

So, please, Massachusetts voters, turn out for Coakley -- just to get these clowns to shut up.

Oh, and by the way, single-digit Senate wins are not unheard of for Massachusetts Democrats -- John Kerry beat William Weld in 1996 by a 52%-45% margin.