McCain's rise may upset Democrats' western strategy -- McCain during debates would say "illegal immigrants are all 'children of God.'"

From The Washington Post:

For Democrats, 2008 was supposed to be the year of the Mountain West, when three years of relentless Republican attacks on undocumented immigrants would fuel a backlash among Hispanics that would change the playing field in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and perhaps alter the landscape of presidential politics for a generation.

But the emergence of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as the likely standard-bearer for the GOP may have scrambled the equation, cooling a potential political revolt among Hispanics and sending Democrats in search of a new playbook.

In consecutive presidential elections, the Democrats have fallen just short of the electoral college votes needed to take the White House. Ohio or Florida could have put them over the top, but this year, Democrats are looking west for those gains. The Democratic National Committee chose Denver as the site of its August nominating convention, and the party moved the Nevada caucuses to the front of the election calendar.

The Hispanic electorate has nearly doubled since President Bush's first election, from 7.5 million in 2000 to an estimated 14 million this year . . . .

McCain, whose name sits beside that of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's on comprehensive immigration reform legislation, has consistently won a majority of Latinos in his home state. And he countered the more heated rhetoric of his competitors for the GOP nomination with a declaration that illegal immigrants are all "children of God."

What McCain is saying has changed. Whereas once he firmly said that no immigration legislation could work unless it twinned tougher border enforcement with a guest-worker program and a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, he now maintains that sealing the border must come first.

In a closed-door meeting with House Republicans last week, he again assured conservatives that he had gotten the message. He had been beaten up badly on the immigration issue, participants said he told them, and understands that the nation's borders must be sealed and independently certified as under control before the next president even considers any further steps.