It's the war in Iraq, stupid

Just in time for tomorrow night's Democratic presidential debate at Dartmouth College, Bill Richardson is going up with a new TV ad in New Hampshire that takes aim at the party's leading candidates for proposing leaving some residual forces in Iraq. The ad features three liberal bloggers advocating Richardson's position that the United States should pull all troops out of Iraq. "Bill Richardson is the only one who would actually end the war," says one blogger, Christina Siun O'Connell of firedoglake.com.

Left unsaid: It's debatable whether it would even be feasible to get troops out of Iraq as fast as Richardson wants to, and whether it's realistic to leave no American troops in the country at all. See Richardson's Iraq plan here.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, is trying to capitalize on his early opposition to the war, which he made clear in a speech on Oct. 2, 2002 in Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago. On Oct. 2 of this year, Obama's campaign is hosting events around the country designed to remind voters that, unlike John Edwards or Hillary Clinton, he opposed the war from the start.