The Bush Touch is Double-Edged

WaPo states the obvious:

His name is not on any ballot this fall, but George W. Bush is the central issue of campaign 2006. Tuesday's vote will deliver a referendum on six years of Bush's leadership -- bold and principled or radically divisive, depending on one's political ideology -- and the wartime policies he has championed....

GOP strategists know well that no political party has successfully weathered a midterm election with such an unpopular president in office. Bush's challenge as he campaigns in the final days of the election is to find a way to excite and mobilize a fractured Republican base without triggering an even bigger turnout among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents that could cost his party the House or Senate.

Except in certain states, my feeling is that Bush is far more damaging to GOP efforts than most Republican strategists understand. Clinton may have had to insist upon his relevance after the losses of '94; the irrelevance of Bush, on the other hand, is a result of Republican victories in the last two elections. The American people understand that the disaster that is our foreign policy and Iraq and our energy policy and our stagnant economy (12,000 on the Dow doesn't cut it) are the result of his administration and his Republican enablers in Congress. It's over. I don't want to sound overconfident, but it's over. And in 6 days even this C- student will understand that.