Words of sanity - and caution - on the NSA surveillance investigation from a partisan Democrat:

"It [the NSA story]could play to the image of a president who is overreaching and not succeeding -- going to war without a clear purpose or credible proof in retrospect, isolating America, wiretapping," Democratic pollster Doug Schoen said.

But he said without evidence of a broader pattern of domestic surveillance by the administration the issue was unlikely to play a big role in November's elections, when control of Congress will be at stake.

"We're a long way away from saying this is a front-burner, hot-button issue that would have an impact on the elections," Schoen said.

"If it is just about Al Qaeda and terrorism, I'm not sure it is a positive for the Democrats. If there is a degree of overreaching by Bush that goes beyond that, then we have an issue," he said.

Many Democrats foolishly assumed from the beginning - without knowing anything more than the vague outlines initially reported by the New York Times - that the NSA surveillance story was a serious negative for President Bush. It just had to be.

Despite not having a clue about the depth or the scope of the program - or any well-founded sense about how the average American would react to it - prominent Democrats like Howard Dean raced forward to say insane things like, "We haven't seen this kind of abuse of power since Richard Nixon."

One the worst (but most frequent) mistakes made in politics is to jump to unfounded conclusions and overplay your hand. Democrats have turned this into something of a high art during the Bush presidency, and we're well down the path to see it happening again.

The more prudent course for Democrats would have been to abstain from making snap judgments based on news reports, wait and see what sort of details come out at the hearings, and then decided whether to blow the issue up. But that would require patience and the ability to focus on something less immediate than trying to damage Bush in the next round of headlines - neither of which have been the Democrats' strong suit in recent years.