Dems Think House Victory is Assured

The political meme, which recently said that the Republicans would likely hold both houses of Congress with smaller majorities has now changed. The new meme is the Dems take the House easily and the Senate barely stays in GOP hands:

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chairman Charles Rangel and Chairman -- again -- John Dingell. Those titles will soon sound familiar.

Barring an unexpected and big event, Democrats will win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November and conceivably the Senate, too. Whether it's a tsunami or just a powerful wave, the political dynamics are moving in that direction, or more accurately, against the Republicans and President George W. Bush.

Democratic insiders, who months ago thought their chances of winning a majority in the House were no better than even, and that the Senate was a lost cause, have become far more optimistic. Now, they say, winning the House is a lock, and the Senate is within reach.

``We have to go back to 1974 (during Watergate) to find such a favorable environment,'' says James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. ``If we can't win in this environment, we have to question the whole premise of the party.''

The sad thing for the Dems is that they can only win in this environment. Consequently, it wouldn't take much of a change in several key factors - such as gas prices - to move the dynamic back toward the GOP. Michael Barone thinks a change is already in the works thanks to concerns about terrorism:

There seems to have been a change in the political winds. They've been blowing pretty strongly against George W. Bush and the Republicans this spring and early this summer. Now, their velocity looks to be tapering off or perhaps shifting direction.

When asked what would affect the future, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said: "Events, dear boy. Events." The event this month that I think has done most to shape opinion was the arrest in London on Aug. 9 of 23 Muslims suspected of plotting to blow up American airliners over the Atlantic.

The arrests were a reminder that there still are lots of people in the world -- and quite possibly in this country, too -- who are trying to kill as many of us as they can and to destroy our way of life. They are not unhappy because we haven't raised the minimum wage lately or because Bush rejected the Kyoto Treaty or even because we're in Iraq.

Read the rest of his piece and his recounting of recent polls here.