Hot Air has the story and the audio:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said on Tuesday that the troop surge, which began in June, has had a significant impact on the situation in Iraq and noted that he had always been critical of the Bush administration for deploying an insufficient number of troops in previous years.

“Stability and a decrease in violence, they’ve done that - God bless them. I’m not surprised that they did,” Hoyer told Cybercast News Service in response to a question about steadily declining U.S. casualty rates in Iraq.

This represents a strong and clear shift in tone for a Democratic leader: nothing about how there's not a trend, nothing about how this is a respite granted us by Moqtada al Sadr, not even anything about there still being a need for a firm timeline for withdrawal.

What gives?

Steny Hoyer is one of the sharper members of the Democratic leadership. He's hated by many in the Netroots because he believes that Democrats need to tread a centrist path to keep the backing of a majority of the American people. He understands that the hard-line against the Iraq war favored by the Democratic base is not a winning message while the troops on the ground are winning the war.

This tone of Hoyer's -- recognizing success and arguing that the president made a fundamental mistake in not listening to Democratic calls for more troops -- might be a trial balloon of the next Democratic argument on Iraq.