Whole email below the fold:

I have a favor to ask regarding my very special friend, Elizabeth Dole. The Nation lost a great hard working advocate for conservative values when her race was swept up in the Obama tide. The Democratic Party spent $12 million to defeat her in North Carolina and special interest groups spent millions more.

The Obama campaign opened 50 field offices with 400 paid staff and 21,000 volunteers, all geared to three weeks of early voting. North Carolina had the biggest increase in voter turnout of any state in the nation, a reflection of the huge amounts of money poured into the state.

I hope you will join me in assisting her with a generous contribution today to retire her debt of $356,043. I believe it would be a travesty if she were left with a debt after all her hard work as a public servant.

Elizabeth has been a pioneer, breaking many glass ceilings for women in her career spanning 40 years. She has spent her life in service to America and the world, and while she lost an election, she has not lost her willingness or ability to continue to serve for the greater good of our nation.

To do that, she needs to conclude old business and that is why your help to retire her campaign debt is so important. Please use this link to send a contribution today to the Elizabeth Dole Committee, Inc., or you may contribute via mail by sending your contribution to Post Office Box 97275, Raleigh, North Carolina 27624. I hope I can count on you to help.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

The ad, produced on behalf of incumbent North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole — who is in a tight re-election fight against her Democratic challenger, Kay Hagan — basically assumes Sen. John McCain will lose in November.

Production Notes: The spot cautions viewers that “these liberals want complete control of government” — as, presumably, so do conservatives. It closes with an ominous warning:

“If [Hagan] wins, they [liberals] get a blank check.”

Wait a minute. I know it doesn’t look good for McCain, but as Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s doomsaying could represent some blowback against McCain’s strategy of highlighting his “maverick” cred in challenging his own party. In effect, McCain has been saying his party has often been wrong.

The logical inference from this premise is: If the Republican Party, which has controlled the presidency for the last eight years –and both houses of Congress for six of those eight years — has been wrong an awful lot lately, enough so that its own presidential nominee has decided his only viable strategy is to distance himself from his party, then why should people re-elect GOP incumbents, let alone its challengers?

If McCain doesn’t win the election, and Republicans get blown out in both houses of Congress — which is widely expected even with a McCain victory, though McCain is certainly not helping — it will be quite interesting to see how warmly he is welcomed back to Capitol Hill.

(Via Politico’s Ben Smith)

Apparently, though, that rule doesn’t apply everywhere. According to CQPolitics, North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) — who held a comfortable lead over Democratic challenger Kay Hagan for most of the year — is now fighting for her life.

From CQPolitics:

[W]hile state Sen. Kay Hagan … once appeared a distinct underdog to Dole, there are multiple signs that this is emerging as one of the year’s key battleground races.

Because of these shifts, CQ Politics has changed its rating on the race, which was Republican Favored, to its tossup category of No Clear Favorite.

There’s much at stake here, with Democrats still eying that magical, filibuster-proof 60-member majority in the upper chamber. North Carolina, always on their radar, now appears achievable. Gonna be a whirlwind ride to November.