Possibly, but far from easily, both from a programming perspective and from the perspective of machine workload.
The problem isn't so much determining how many 's to put on both sides of the button. The problem is taking into account the many different text sizes people can configure on the site, in their own browser, and in their own operating systems.
I could set it up so it'd work beautifully for me, with the whole button clickable, but it probably would look wrong for 95% of the rest of us.
Another downside of using the buttons is that since the color of the text in them is "forced" according to whatever settings each user has selected, the "Previous" and "Next" buttons don't change colors to show if you've read the previous message like the text version does.