Iraq: Ailing Democratic Party since 2006

Not surprisingly, the New York Times picks up on how the Democrats used the war in Iraq to leverage their way into Congress.

The story talks about how Iraq had fallen off of the media's radar and how a bloody and violent month of October overseas helped to raise the profile of the war again to a point where Democrats could use it as a means to Congressional ends.

But the White House helped too, they say:

Republicans, normally sure-footed this decade, reacted with a tentativeness that they called evidence of a divergence between a White House that viewed a victory in Iraq as central to Mr. Bush’s image and Republican candidates who saw the war as poisoning an already difficult re-election environment.

Senior Republican strategists said they told candidates to avoid talking about the war, and even to distance themselves from it, and urged the White House to change its approach, at least through November. But that strategy was undercut by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who kept making the case for victory in forum after forum, ensuring that the issue remained in public view.

What a novel approach for Democrats.