The soaring price of oil burst into the political campaign yesterday, as American light crude reached a record $50 a barrel and Senator Edwards fired off a press release blaming President Bush, the Iraq war, and the oil companies.

“Before the war, the Bush administration was predicting that oil prices would be $27 a barrel at this point,” the Democratic nominee for vice president said. “One central reason for these high prices is this administration’s mismanagement of Iraqi oil pipelines. Meanwhile, as your gas prices go up, the oil companies’ profits go up.”

Analysts say higher oil prices are not an automatic winner for Senator Kerry’s campaign.

“If people are going to vote based on $2-per-gallon gas prices, no one in Washington in either party is hearing anything about it,” a Schwab Washington Research Group analyst, Greg Valliere, said. At $3 a gallon, “I could see some impact for Senator Kerry, but only the stock market is rattled now.”

Mr. Valliere said another factor limiting the appeal of high oil prices as an electoral issue is that Mr. Kerry and his running mate have not staked out an energy policy that is radically different from the administration’s.

“They both have opposed expanded offshore and Alaskan drilling, so anything they advocate would take years to implement,” he said of the Democratic running mates. Mr. Valliere said voters would focus on energy policy only in times of crisis, such as the oil shortages of the 1970s.

“This election is connected to national security, Iraq, and the economy, all areas where Kerry can make some inroads and still close the gap. Oil prices aren’t one of the things that will do it for him,” he said.

The Bush-Cheney re-election campaign was dismissive of any attempt to make oil prices a campaign issue.

“John Edwards should phone campaign headquarters and ask why Senator Kerry supported a 50-cent-pergallon tax increase on gasoline,” a Bush-Cheney re-election campaign spokesman, Kevin Madden, said, referring to a position Mr. Kerry embraced in the distant past. “He might also want to come up with an answer for why both he and Senator Kerry have refused to pass the president’s energy bill, which would have begun a process of making us less dependent on foreign energy supplies.”

One difficulty in making oil prices a wedge issue is that, adjusted for inflation, America has seen higher prices. Adjusted for inflation, oil prices averaged $80 a barrel during the spring and summer of 1979 as Iran went though its Islamic revolution.

Merrill Lynch’s oil sector equity research team released a report yesterday that said, “Oil may still be cheap.” Had crude oil prices risen at the rate of the non-energy components of the consumer price index since 1980,”it would be trading at $95 a barrel right about now,” the analysts reported.

Another difficulty in making oil prices a partisan issue is that it would put the Democratic ticket in the position of rooting for something that has deleterious effects on corporate bottom lines and consumer confidence.

Yesterday’s federal report on Consumer Confidence declined for a second straight month, with economists attributing the decline in part to consumer fears about higher oil prices.

“The Democrats have made very impressive strides over the past decade in becoming sensitive to business interests,” Schwab’s Mr. Valliere said. “Business hates oil cost increases. They win nothing if corporations don’t hire or increase wages.”

The increase in petroleum prices has won Republicans no friends among the Green lobby, even though in the past many environmental activists have argued for higher oil prices to curtail automobile use.

The National Resources Defense Council, long an advocate for legislating higher fuel taxes and higher fuel economy standards, is using the occasion of oil crossing the $50 threshold to reiterate its call for Mr. Kerry’s re-election.

“The problem with oil prices is demand outstripping supply,” said an NRDC spokesman, Roland Hwang. “We must reduce this demand and put to use the technologies that will reduce the impact of automobiles on the environment. We need a change of leadership to make this a priority.”

Another reason the politics of oil price increases is not clear-cut is that the American economy has shifted its orientation.

“As we’ve shifted more to a service economy and increased efficiency, we’ve become less sensitive to energy prices as a nation, since we import so much of the oil-price-sensitive manufactured goods from lower-cost nations,” said the senior economist at RBC Dain Rauscher, Vince Boberski.