Conor responds to Ledeen:

It isn’t healthy when you’re country is fighting a war, and the bulk of the population can forget about it entirely, though it is costing them blood, treasure and foregone opportunities to make us safer from other threats. But isn’t it a bit odd to say the media aren’t reporting on Iraq because “it’s good for Bush” when in fact the Iraq War is a winning issue for Democrats?

This is related to what I said below.  One of the things that I found a bit baffling about McCain’s ability to keep the race competitive for as long as he did was that the public had overwhelmingly rejected continuing the Iraq war in 2006, yet McCain made the “surge” one of the central planks of his campaign.  Indeed, McCain made a point of bragging about his desire to keep the war going as long as necessary and he kept reminding voters that if Obama had had his way the war would already be over by now.  He didn’t put it that way, but that was the message he was delivering.  It is pretty rare when your opponent makes it one of his main preoccupations to remind voters that you share their view on a major policy question.  This was a colossal blunder on McCain’s part, but it is the kind of blunder that a candidate will inevitably make when he and all of his supporters keep insisting that Iraq is a winning issue for them when the exact opposite is true.  No doubt many of them believe it, just as they genuinely believe that McCain is much better prepared to be President–that’s why they’re McCain supporters.  (There has to be some reason for it, I suppose.)  But the certainty that Iraq and the “surge” are winning issues is just like the certainty that Palin is and will continue to be a sensational, popular national candidate or the certainty that Joe the Plumber/”spread the wealth” are a killer combination or the certainty that more aggressively tying Obama to past associates will bring him down: the people who already believe this seem to assume that a majority of the public will respond to each of these things more or less as they do, and they begin to interpret everything from media coverage to campaign tactics to daily events accordingly.