Democratic Battle Hands Mccain Lead

Republican party presidential nominee John McCain has surged in key polls as his Democratic rivals fight an increasingly bitter battle that could scupper their White House chances.

Some pundits now believe that the divisive race between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is handing McCain and the Republicans an unexpected chance to win a presidential election in which most indicators should favor a Democratic candidate.

Certainly some recent polls have showed McCain moving up strongly. The respected Rasmussen daily tracking poll had McCain beating Clinton by five points and Obama by three points at the end of last week. The Gallup tracking poll also has McCain now ahead of both Clinton and Obama.

The shift can partly be put down to the bloody fight in the Democratic party over the past month since Clinton's surprise comeback victories in Texas and Ohio. 'No Democrats are holding [McCain] to account right now. He is free to do what he wants and he is getting a boost from that,' said Professor Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver and a former official in the Clinton White House.

At the same time McCain has launched a well co-ordinated effort to unite his party, raise funds and sell himself to the US public as a likable war hero who is strong on national security. TV and web ads are already running, showing stills of McCain lying wounded in a hospital bed after being tortured in Vietnam.

Such tactics show how the Republicans are already fighting the general election, while the Democrats are still hotly debating their nomination process. McCain spent the past week on a national tour of America dubbed 'The Service to America Tour', which took in half a dozen cities the Republican has lived in, from Florida to Arizona. The trip generated lots of local TV news coverage in key battleground states.

Such stage-managed coverage is in marked contrast to the tone of the Democratic debate. Both campaigns and their surrogates regularly attack each other as the race heads to the next primary contest of Pennsylvania on 22 April. Though Obama holds a virtually unassailable lead in the popular vote, Clinton has shown no signs of quitting the race. Instead, she has vowed to take the contest to the party convention in August to try to win the nomination there, by persuading the so-called super delegates - made up of party officials and politicians - to choose her over Obama.

If the Democratic race is still undecided by the time of the Denver convention in late August, then McCain will have had more than four months of having the national field to himself. Such a time frame will allow him to continue cementing a positive image in the public mind.

It will also allow him to raise desperately needed funds. The Democratic race has seen huge sums from supporters that have dwarfed Republican campaign coffers. But a costly and lengthy contest will allow the Republicans to try to narrow that gap. At the same time, the party will seek to present a united front now that its morale has been given a real boost by the Democratic candidates' infighting.

However, many experts still expect the Democratic nominee to be able to derail McCain's campaign after Denver.