With their high profile the candidates for the Democratic nomination are prime targets for the opponents of the down ticket races.

From today’s New York Times:

BATON ROUGE, La. — A Democrat stands a serious chance of taking a seat in the House of Representatives from Republicans in a special election here on Saturday. But to achieve that chance of victory in this Republican fortress, the candidate has labored to dissociate himself from the Democratic Party’s national leaders.

The Republicans knows who their nominee is going to be (save some great catastrophe) and the Democrats do not, this leaves the Democratic races down the ticket in the lurch as they are more vulnerable to attack.

What’s more pressing though is that the Democratic Party is now portrayed as the ultra-left wing, just as the Republican Party is portrayed as the ultra-right wing. Need proof? Read redstate and then dailykos and you’ll see what I mean.

The fact of the matter is, there is as wide a divide between conservative-Democrats and liberal-Democrats as there is between conservative-Republicans and liberal-Republicans; just as there is a divide between Republican and Democrat.

So an opponent can attempt to polarize the voters by lumping you together with someone who is seen as too liberal, this sort of maneuvering is called a “straw man” argument.

Mr. Cazayoux, 44, steered clear of Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York while repeatedly mentioning his endorsement by the so-called Blue Dog coalition of conservative Democrats.

That stance provoked a burst of frustration from Mr. Jenkins — “it’s a tactic of the Democratic Party to talk conservative in campaigns” — and has unleashed a deluge of advertisements and fliers from Republicans and conservative groups seeking to redefine Mr. Cazayoux as a “liberal,” an unlikely appellation in a state where at most a handful of black politicians from the larger cities meet the definition.

“A vote for Don Cazayoux is a vote to increase Nancy Pelosi’s and Hillary Clinton’s liberal majority in Congress,” says a commercial financed by the antitax group Club for Growth.