Spread some butter on this guy — he’s toast.

Yesterday afternoon, Senator McCain’s two top campaign aides, campaign manager Terry Nelson and chief consultant John Weaver, held a somber conference call with reporters to relay the bad news: The McCain campaign has raised only $11.2 million in its second quarter fund-raising drive, far short of its target and on track for another third-place finish behind Mitt Romney and Mayor Giuliani, and as a result is “restructuring.” Restructuring, here, is a euphemism on par with “rightsizing.” What it means, in truth, is slashing a reported 50 staffers from the campaign and imposing salary cuts on the remaining employees. Mr. Nelson, during the call, disclosed that he would “take the next few months off the payroll” — that is, he would work for free.

No wonder he sounded throughout the call as if he were just about ready to slit his wrists.

Worse than the prognosis, however, is the prescription. Having already followed one botched strategy in pursuit of the Republican Party nomination to near death, the McCain campaign apparently has chosen to finish itself off slowly and painfully. Dr. Jack Kevorkian no longer being in the business of performing assisted suicides, the McCain folks have chosen the second-best option: an early-state strategy, focusing, that is, on the traditionally decisive states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

In a normal election cycle, this would be smart. But in this front-loaded election cycle — with some 20-plus states likely to be voting on February 5 — it’s pure folly.

The McCain campaign has grown used to operating on bad assumptions. It assumed that Mr. McCain would be the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination, akin to the steamroller George W. Bush campaign that flattened the Arizona senator in 2000. It assumed that Mr. Giuliani either wouldn’t run or would crumble immediately if he did. It assumed that Mr. Romney would fall on his face, early and hard. It assumed that no popular conservative-alternative candidate (Newt Gingrich, Secretary of State Rice, Fred Thompson)would run. It assumed that conservatives would settle for Mr. McCain despite campaign finance reform, disagreements on immigration, distrust on abortion — the list goes on and on.

Every single one of these assumptions proved false.

Now they’ve got a whole new set of false assumptions. They assume that having failed to win with the “untouchable front-runner” model, they can now make over their candidate as a scrappy outsider (despite his having been joined at the hip with President Bush for the last four years). They assume that Mr. Giuliani will self-destruct (despite all evidence to the contrary). They assume that Mr. Romney has a glass jaw (despite his deep pockets). And they assume that wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are A) possible, and B) likely to change the course of the nomination battle.

It’s this last set of assumptions that is so wrong, and so laughable. First off, it’s not as if Mr. McCain has been neglecting these early states to date — and he’s still down in all three. A new poll out of Iowa from American Research Group has Mr. McCain in fourth place, behind Messrs. Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson.

And if the campaign is so desperate for cash that it takes public matching funds — as it says it’s seriously considering — it will be handicapped by the low state-by-state spending limits that come with the federal money: roughly $1.5 million in Iowa, $800,000 in New Hampshire, and $2.1 million in South Carolina. That will only make competing against the well-funded Mr. Romney all the harder.

And note that Mr. McCain will be competing mainly against Mr. Romney in those states. Messrs. Giuliani and Thompson already see this race for what it is — a national primary, culminating in a showdown in Florida on January 29 and in states like New York, New Jersey, California, and Illinois on February 5. Their national celebrity and fund-raising prowess will make them more than formidable in this contest — where the real delegates are at stake.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, will be hoping to parlay a small-state bounce into national attention and credibility. But this is 2008, not 2000. Mr. McCain might like to style himself an insurgent, but he’s been around for a while. The voters already know him, and they don’t particularly like him. If this is all he’s got, it’s a pretty pathetic weapon.

As they say, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Especially if it’s a butter knife.