We're Five Months Out ...

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... and the landscape is looking pretty good for the Republicans.

There was a time when Democrats believed — or said they believed — that they could recapture the House and hold on to the Senate in 2014, giving the president a Democratic Congress with which to work in the final two years of his presidency.

But that idea seems to have disappeared. (I have a Democrat acquaintance who would call such a statement "rabid right." I think he's been drinking a bit too deeply from the left–wing Kool–Aid.) Presidential approval numbers have been stuck in the low to mid–40s for a year, and a president's party almost never fares well in midterms when the president is struggling.

That's from the lofty perspective of history, which is not infallible. Conventional wisdom said a black man could not be elected president, yet one has been elected president — twice. Conventional wisdom once said a woman could not be elected president, but two women have been nominated for vice president, one in each party, and it appears likely that, at some point, probably in the near future, a woman will be nominated as the standard–bearer for one of the parties.

The conventional wisdom is that midterms are difficult for every president, even the popular ones, although there have been cases in which the president's party did well in a midterm — and it is the hope for that miraculous victory, like Truman's upset win over Dewey in 1948, that always encourages losing candidates and parties. Typically, though, a political miracle like that in a midterm requires some sort of backlash against the other party or some other unusual circumstance (like the September 11 terrorist attacks) that prompts voters to rally around the flag.

Realistically, such a thing is still possible — and will remain possible until the votes are counted — but we're only five months out ...

... and, on the ground, the Rothenberg Political Report currently sees anything from no net gain to the gain of a few seats by the Republicans in the House. Sabato's Crystal Ball sees Republicans gaining between five and eight seats. The Cook Political Report doesn't see a great likelihood of a shift.

The Republicans already hold a 33–seat advantage; Democrats, as I say, believed — at one time — that they could wrest 17 seats from the Republicans and claim a slim majority. The closer we get to November, though, the more it looks like the Democrats will be lucky to avoid losing ground.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been keeping their eyes on the Senate, where flipping six seats would give the GOP a slim majority. Numerically, it seems like an easier task, doesn't? Truth is it's more of a challenge when you look at it as a percentage of the legislative body. Seventeen House seats represents less than 4% of the membership; six Senate seats is 6% of that body's membership.

Democrat–held Senate seats in South Dakota, West Virginia and Montana currently are expected to flip, according to the Cook Political Report, Rothenberg Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball.

That gets the Republicans halfway to their goal. Cook sees seven tossups, only one of which is held by a Republican. Sabato sees four tossups, all held by Democrats. Rothenberg sees two pure tossups, both held by Democrats.

That suggests that the Republicans are in a good spot — and, if things proceed in this manner, they could start focusing on second–tier seats, the ones they probably never dreamed they might be able to win — until recently.

Like Tom Harkin's seat in Iowa.

Harkin is retiring after 30 years in the Senate. Alex Roarty writes in National Journal that Democrats need to be concerned about Harkin's seat. State Sen. Joni Ernst won the Republican nomination there this week; she still needs to demonstrate that she is a tough candidate, Roarty says, but she is facing a mediocre Democrat in a year that looks more Republican with each passing day, and she doesn't look like the kind of candidate who is likely to shoot herself in the foot.

In fact, recently, the one doing such shooting was her rival, who seems to have fired a machine gun at himself.

Persons who are unacquainted with Iowa's history may be inclined to look only at the returns in presidential elections; Iowa has voted for Democrats in six of the last seven, including two (Dukakis in '88, Gore in '00) who lost. But in eight of the nine elections before 1988, Iowa voted for the Republican nominee.

But what about the midterm elections since 1988? Well, Harkin was re–elected twice in midterm election years, and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley was re–elected in two midterms as well.

The governor is elected to a four–year term every midterm election year, and Democrats and Republicans have split those, 3–3.

That sounds to me like a state that really could go either way. It is also a state that seems to be quite comfortable with its incumbents. Harkin survived in years when it was risky to be a Democrat elsewhere; Grassley, who was elected in the Reagan Revolution of 1980, won his second term in the decidedly un–Republican year of 1986. The popular Republican governor is now the state's longest–serving — and the second–longest serving governor in the nation's history

Iowa has four representatives in the U.S. House. Two are Democrats, two are Republicans.

Recent polls show Ernst leading — by six points in the latest Loras College survey, by one point in the latest Rasmussen survey. Her Democratic opponent was leading in surveys held before the June 3 primaries.

The Future Is Now

If you've lost your job or your home, you already know that the future — for you — is now.

It's not that immediate for presidents most of the time. Certainly not for this president, who hasn't been in office for six months yet, enjoys the continued good will of the people and won't have to ask for their votes for another three years.

But, for one–third of the members of the Senate and all of the members of the House, the campaign trail for 2010 beckons.

And for them, as Amy Walter points out in National Journal, "the long view isn't politically feasible."

They must be prepared to face some tough questions about the economy. And they must be prepared to answer those questions soon.

The unemployed will want to know when they can expect things to turn around — if there is scant evidence, at that point, of a blossoming recovery. As Walter observes, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer may have circulated, at a recent breakfast, an "impressive list" of a baker's dozen initiatives the administration has enacted. "But the next election will be a referendum on the economy. Period."

And Walter proceeds to bring the matter into focus for both Democrats and Republicans.

"If things are looking good, then Democrats can make the case for why it's important to keep their party in charge," she writes. "If it's not, then all the bragging about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act or Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights won't mean much."

Maybe it seems unfair to be judged in this way. It may well be.

But life isn't fair. I imagine that just about everyone who is unemployed would acknowledge that.

Maybe it's unrealistic to expect to see signs of a recovery as soon as next year, given the fact that this recession is seen as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Well, unrealistic or not, you play the cards you're dealt.

From the incumbents' perspective, it would be great to run with GDP humming along and unemployment about as low as it can possibly get.

But that isn't the hand we've been dealt.

At least, not yet.

The Winter (and Spring) of Our Discontent

He hasn't even reached that mythical 100–day mark in his administration, but there are signs that the "honeymoon" may be over for Barack Obama.

On a personal level, Obama still seems to be popular with the voters — his latest job approval figures range from the mid-50s (Rasmussen) to the mid-60s (CNN/Opinion Research). But his policies? Not so much.

Most of the mutterings I've read lately have been coming from abroad. For example, David Warren writes in the Ottawa Citizen that, while the majority of Americans voted for Obama last November, they did not endorse his policies.

"[T]hey wanted Obama the man, but not Obama the agenda, except for the uplifting rhetorical bits about 'hope,' 'change,' and so forth," writes Warren. "The idea that the man could not be separated from the agenda never fully fixed."

I'm inclined to agree with that, as well as Warren's assertion that Obama "was perfectly sincere in denying that he was [an ideologue], and in claiming that he would be looking for bipartisan consensus."

And, Warren continues, "I also think he is sincere in proceeding with an agenda ... that leaves most Republicans, and quite a few of the more conservative Democrats, utterly aghast."

Warren is skeptical that there will be a second term for Obama. "Sixty days into his first term (and I begin to doubt there'll be a second), he would seem already to have dug a hole from which no rhetorical skill can lift him."

It may be a little premature to be wondering about the prospects for a second term, but it isn't too early to assess the Democratic Party's chances in the 2010 midterm elections. And that's a subject Charlie Cook has been examining in the National Journal.

"Republicans have pulled even with Democrats on the generic congressional ballot test," Cook reports, citing findings from Democratic pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Republican pollster Public Opinion Strategies. The key to this good news for the GOP seems to be independent voters. As Cook writes, "[V]oters who call themselves independents gave GOP candidates the edge by 14 points, 38 percent to 24 percent."

Cook's analysis of the poll results is worth reading in full, but I find it hard to argue with his conclusion that "although Republicans still 'have their work cut out for them,' the public doesn't want to give President Obama and the Democrats in Congress a blank check."

From "across the pond," as they say in England, The Guardian urges people to give Obama some time. It has been suggested, The Guardian writes, that Obama "may be less the new Abraham Lincoln or the new Franklin Roosevelt than the new Jimmy Carter."

That seems a little unfair to me, although Obama, like Carter, is an intelligent, well-educated man who may be replicating Carter's mistake of trying to do too much at once.

"According to this arresting but surely premature argument, Mr. Obama is making Mr. Carter's mistake of giving too much priority to pushing a new social agenda and is not focusing enough on trying to fix the economy," writes The Guardian.

Much of the response from abroad appears to stem from Obama's decision to send a video message to Iran — which, I suppose, only invites comparisons to Carter, whose downfall was brought about, in large part, because of the American hostages in that country. However, as The Guardian observes, "Mr. Obama was smart enough to couch his message in cultural, rather than explicitly political, terms."

In the end, The Guardian counsels, "Mr. Obama gets some things wrong. But he is doing the big things right. Give him time."

Domestically, Obama seems to have kept most of his defenders, but their ranks are diminishing.

Perhaps one of the best examples of that is Maureen Dowd, who writes in today's New York Times about Michelle Obama's new vegetable garden on the White House lawn — and her promise that everyone in the family, including her husband, will pull weeds "whether they like it or not."

Dowd, who made no secret of her support for Obama even before he announced his candidacy, observed that the scene "left me wondering if the wrong Obama is in the Oval."

As Dowd puts it, "It's a time in America's history where we need less smooth jazz and more martial brass."

And she suggests that Obama may have "lost touch with his hole–in–the–shoe, hole–in–the–Datsun, have–not roots."

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the economy went through some rough patches, although they certainly weren't as dire as the circumstances we face today.

Some friends of my parents owned some land in the country where they kept some livestock and a stock pond filled with fish. They made available part of their land for their friends to use for vegetable gardens to help them save money on their food bills, and my parents took them up on the offer.

For a few years, we consumed our homegrown vegetables exclusively (I was particularly fond of our turnip greens, tomatoes and corn on the cob).

And I found that weeding our garden, from time to time, gave me an opportunity to think through all sorts of things that I had been finding puzzling. Spending time in the garden like that, where it was peaceful and quiet (except for a bird's occasional burst into song), had an invigorating quality.

Perhaps the president could re–discover his roots if he put on an old pair of jeans and took a trowel out to Michelle's garden for a few hours.