19 July 2010

Dems in Panic Mode as Reality Sinks In

And that reality is this: Republicans are on a trajectory to pick-up massive numbers of House and Senate seats in November's midterm elections...



Perhaps even both houses of Congress- whilst the Dems begin to turn on one-another:

Under pressure, the Democrats are cracking. On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there is a realization that Nancy Pelosi's hold on the speakership is in true jeopardy; that losing control of the Senate is not out of the question; and that time, once the Democrats' best friend, is now their mortal enemy. 

Since January, when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, the President's party has tried to downplay in public what its pollsters have been saying in private: that Obama's alienation of independents and white voters, along with the enthusiasm gap between the right and the left, means that Republicans are on a trajectory to pick up massive numbers of House and Senate seats, perhaps even to regain control of Congress.

Evidence of the pervasiveness of this view: Sunday's New York Times op-ed page, which featured a series of short essays from leading Democratic and Republican strategists about how Obama could go about staging a political comeback, focused not on November's midterms but on 2012 — an indication that Washington conventional wisdom has already written off prospects of Democrats sustaining a majority in the legislature.
And this coming from Time/CNN mind you ... must really be bad for the Obammunists now. Most of Obama's rubes on the Hill must have realized they were sticking their necks out for Team Obama over the last 18 mos, but it seems Gibsy's admission on May 11th that they were in real political trouble brought intra-party tension to a boil. 
xxx
A painful realization that the Senate -long thought safe- was now in-play too hasn't done much for the progressives' moral as of late, either:


...it forced Pelosi & Co. to recognize that the first part of their plan is failing. Public and private polling suggests that anxiety over the lack of jobs and anger over the big-spending ways of the Administration will trump the merits of the stimulus spending, health care reform and the financial regulation bill in voters' minds. Neither the economy nor voters' perceptions are likely to be turned around by Election Day. Congressional Democrats were aware of this hard reality before Gibbs opened his mouth, but having him say it out loud was apparently too much for those on the Hill to bear...