Is this election a referendum on Iraq?

Listening to the radio I just heard the announcer reading the results of a poll asking whether these mid-term elections are a referendum on the Bush administration's conduct of the war. I didn't catch the exact results but it really doesn't matter. This election, as much as it reflects voter opinion on the war, can not be a referendum on the administration's strategy and actions. At most it could be a referendum on what the mainstream media has chosen to tell voters about the war.

Every so often I see an article that quotes a soldier or Marine in Iraq and their most frequent complaint isn't the attacks by insurgents but rather how their efforts are being misreported as failing by our media. If our media wants to show they support the troops then step one is to tell the truth about their successes. Why are people slipping in their support for the war? The main reason is our media has treated each casualty as an opportunity to claim we are losing the war. Average people getting their news from Katie and friends at night and the Plain Dealer or the Dayton Daily News in the morning are worn down by the steady drumbeat of negativity. With our current media we would have quit WW II and gone home the day after D-Day. And we would never have responded to Pearl Harbor. Each lousy island in the Pacific cost us many more casualties than we have lost in Iraq. Sure, it would be wonderful if our military could operate without the enemy ever returning fire, but it just doesn't work like that.