While Democrats absorbed the lessons of Pennsylvania this week, John McCain was coming to a few realizations of his own. For one, “big money” in politics isn’t so bad after all.

That’s the takeaway from the presumptive GOP nominee’s new fund-raising strategy, which his campaign has quietly rolled out these past few weeks. The McCain camp is teaming up with the Republican National Committee to tap into big, big donations from big, big donors – hoping to close the big, big money gap with Democrats.

Their effort to do so will involve some creative abuse of the campaign finance restrictions Mr. McCain authored a few years back. Whatever. The Arizonan may not yet fully understand that money is speech. At least he has come around to the view that more of the stuff is better when it comes to winning the presidency.

Whatever has driven the shift – conversion, pragmatism, desperation – Mr. McCain’s new financial determination is welcome news to his supporters. GOP voters had worried their candidate would unnecessarily fetter himself with self-imposed finance restrictions. Instead, he looks eager to win. And as far as strategies go, this one is arguably Mr. McCain’s best shot at evening the odds against a money powerhouse like Barack Obama.

The joke, of course, is that Mr. McCain helped create those long odds. Turns out this whole campaign-finance thingy hasn’t turned out to be the clean-politics, leveled-playing-field he envisioned. All it has done is handicap Mr. McCain.

The senator thought he had a fellow-reformer in Mr. Obama. Then the Democrat figured out how to tap into the small-dollar contributions required under McCain-Feingold. Now he’s awash in cash and unlikely to sign up for the general-election public-financing system both men once lauded.

Unable to match Mr. Obama with smaller donors and (thanks to his own law) unable to cash any million-dollar donations, Mr. McCain is resigned to public financing. This will limit him to $84 million in taxpayer funds from the convention to Election Day. Mr. Obama will have no such restrictions.

Meanwhile, McCain-Feingold’s biggest “accomplishment” these past five years has been the flowering of those shadowy operations known as 527s, which abide by no rules. Democrats have fine-tuned these outfits, and are gearing up to unload hundreds of millions in negative advertising on none other than Mr. McCain. This bullet is aimed not at his foot, but his head.