COLLEEN HAS HER PARTY'S TALKING POINTS DOWN

MONTGOMERY, Minn. — For better or worse, Coleen Rowley the candidate for Congress sounds a lot like Coleen Rowley the FBI whistleblower.

The former FBI agent who scathingly exposed the bureau's failure to uncover the Sept. 11 plot is running for a House seat in Minnesota in 2006 as a Democrat, and she is employing her fearlessly blunt style on the campaign trail.

"This was a lied-into war that is a quagmire now," the 50-year-old Rowley recently told a group of rural Democrats in a garage in this small town south of the Twin Cities. ` ongoing deception."

Whether that kind of talk is smart politics is another matter.

The Democrats nationally are struggling with how to oppose the war without looking weak on national security, and some of them see Rowley's head-on attacks — as well as her trip to Texas in August to lend support to Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protest at President Bush's ranch — as especially risky in the Republican-leaning 2nd Congressional District.

"If you become known as a single-issue candidate against the war in a conservative district, I don't see how that gets you many votes," said Steven Schier, a political science professor at Northfield's Carleton College, in the 2nd District. "So far it seems like some of the moves she's made are counterproductive." Full story at Fox News