POST PARTISAN

Excerpts from The Post's opinion blog, updated daily at washingtonpost.com/postpartisan

The White House's election-year fratricide

Democrats are not known for being overburdened with the gift of partisan solidarity, but in throwing R. Creigh Deeds under the bus, the White House is setting a high bar for election-year fratricide.

Deeds, the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia -- one of just two states with gubernatorial races this fall -- has not run the most strategically adept campaign. Nor is he a particularly adroit candidate; he often struggles to find sound-biteable ways to frame issues to his advantage, and his slightly stammering delivery can be awkward. Still, he has been an effective state senator, and he has the only realistic plan for dealing with the state's most critical problem, transportation.

He also happens to be the Democratic nominee.

That's not good enough for the White House, apparently. Peeved that Deeds declined to define himself as "an Obama Democrat" -- when pressed, he said, "I'm a Creigh Deeds Democrat" -- the White House and its shills in the national Democratic Party (including, prominently, the DNC chair and sitting Virginia governor, Tim Kaine) are blaming Deeds for ignoring their advice. Had he only taken it, he wouldn't be lagging so badly in the polls, they insist.

But then there's the small matter of the Obama administration's ham-fisted handling of the health-care debate and its dithering on everything from Afghanistan to the Dalai Lama. That has made the campaign trail in Virginia toxic not only for Deeds but also for dozens of down-ballot Democrats, many of whom have expressed dismay at the disenchantment they are encountering with the administration itself.

In a Friday front-page story by The Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Anne E. Kornblut, Democrats are critical of Deeds's failure to lock up support from a pair of African American luminaries in Virginia: former governor Doug Wilder and Sheila Johnson, the wealthy co-founder of Black Entertainment Television. But had Obama himself campaigned more vigorously for Deeds -- so far the president has appeared with him only once, despite numerous fall forays to the Washington suburbs -- who would be talking about Wilder and Johnson?

The White House is clearly dreading the prospect of news stories that portray a Republican victory in Virginia as an early referendum on the Obama presidency. But in their hurry to blame Deeds himself, the administration is overlooking its own role in the Democrats' travails. And in the process, it will be largely responsible for the down-ballot collateral damage that Democrats look likely to suffer on Election Day, Nov. 3.

-- Lee Hockstader