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One of the most powerful analysts in Washington has declared that the American presidential election is all but over. So have some Republicans.

But John McCain insists he has only begun to campaign.

“We're six points down,” the Republican presidential nominee told supporters at a rally in Virginia Beach, Va., Monday. “The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes” for the Oval Office.

“My friends,” he said, grinning, “we've got them just where we want them.”

That line is part of a new stump speech Mr. McCain unveiled Monday in an effort to rejuvenate a deeply troubled campaign.

Charles Cook, whose forecasts are among the most watched in Washington, declared Monday that the election is “almost unwinnable” for Mr. McCain.

“At this stage, the most relevant question would seem to be: ‘How big will the train wreck be for the Republican Party up and down the ballot in November?' ” he wrote on his website.

William Kristol is founding editor of the Weekly Standard, perhaps the most influential conservative magazine in the United States.

“It's time for John McCain to fire his campaign,” he declared in a column published Monday.

“He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama's.”

Such Titanic sentiments are flooding newspapers and websites in part because some, though not all, polls show the gap in popularity between Mr. McCain and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama becoming irreversible.

A poll released Monday by both Washington Post/ABC News and Gallup daily tracking shows Mr. Obama leading Mr. McCain by an all-but-insurmountable 10 points.

“Though every race is different, no presidential candidate has come back from an October deficit this large in pre-election polls dating to 1936,” ABC analyst Gary Langer observed.

Gallup daily tracking has the spread among likely voters at seven percentage points. The Rasmussen daily tracking poll has the race narrowing to five points, and Reuters/CSpan/Zogby puts it at four points. The RealClearPolitics aggregate Monday was 7.4 per cent.

The state races, however, may offer a clearer picture of the situation. Mr. Obama enjoys a seemingly rock-solid 12-point lead in Iowa, which voted Republican in 2004.

And his aggregate lead in Virginia, which once was considered reliably Republican, is now above six points. Provided he held the states won by John Kerry in 2004 – and Mr. Obama enjoys comfortable leads in all those states – winning just Virginia and Iowa would put Mr. Obama above the 270 electoral college votes needed for victory.

But it gets worse for Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama is winning, though often by narrow margins, in every other traditional battleground state – Florida, Ohio, Missouri and the like – that went Republican in 2004, with the exception of Indiana, where Mr. McCain clings to a narrow lead.

And states we shouldn't even be talking about have joined the list of battlegrounds. Mr. McCain's aggregate-poll lead in West Virginia, which George W. Bush won in 2004 by 13 percentage points, is just two points today. His lead in Georgia is just under seven points, with one poll putting the gap as low a three points. Mr. Bush took that state in 2004 by 17 points.

No wonder some Republicans are openly grumbling. Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor and Secretary of Health in Mr. Bush's administration, introduced Mr. McCain at a Wisconsin rally last week.

But when a New York Times reporter asked him if he was happy with the campaign, he replied: “No. I don't know who is.”

Republican Representative Lee Terry of Nebraska is running a newspaper ad featuring a woman who calls herself an “Obama-Terry voter.”

Conservative columnist Christopher Buckley, son of the legendary late William F., recently wrote that Mr. McCain's feckless campaign and his choice of Sarah Palin as vice-presidential candidate – Mr. Buckley called her “an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that” – had persuaded him to vote for Mr. Obama.

“It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive,” he wrote. “They'd cut off my allowance.”

It wasn't all horse race, Monday. Mr. Obama released a new economic package to deal with the financial emergency.

The plan calls for a 90-day moratorium on mortgage foreclosures, a tax credit for employers who create jobs and new rules that would allow individuals to withdraw money from their pension accounts without a tax penalty.

In unveiling the new measures, the Democratic presidential nominee displayed unusual candour in blaming this economic mess, in part, on consumers who spent irresponsibly.

“Everyone was living beyond their means – from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street,” he told supporters at a rally in Toledo, Ohio.

“CEOs got greedy,” he went on. “Politicians spent money they didn't have. Lenders tricked people into buying homes they couldn't afford and some folks knew they couldn't afford them and they bought them anyway.

“We've lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits … to borrow instead of save …

“Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what's necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again – to live within our means.”

Surrogates for Mr. McCain said Sunday that he would be releasing a revised economic plan of his own this week. But other reports said the campaign had changed its mind after an all-day strategy session Sunday.

“I have no comment on anything, to anybody,” said McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin.