Election 2006: Are things as dark as they seem?

Is it all about Iraq, or is it something else? I just filled up my gas tank for a whoppping $1.96 per gallon. The stock market is about to crack 12,000. Unemployment is at 4.6 percent: basically, a job for anyone who wants one. The deficit is around 200 million, around the same as during Reagan, meaning--in real dollars--substantionally less. Inflation has been so low, and for so long, not one person in a hundred could tell you what the current rate is. (I just asked my office-mate, Aaron Knight, a smart guy, government professor, and chair of social sciences, if he knew the current rate of inflation. He didn't, I don't, and neither do you.) In other words, Absent Iraq everything points to the GOP at least holding its own, never mind six-year fatigue, never mind the scandals of DeLay, Ney, and Foley. The past two elections, the GOP has run rings around the Democrats, in part because of the perceived Democratic preoccupation with all things process in the War on Terror.

Up to about this past spring, every New York Times bombshell regarding this or that sleuthing technique was worth at least five points in the polls. Democrats looked so inept attempting to block President Bush's Supreme Court nominees that usually hapless Press Secretary Scott McClellan took to clowning John Kerry for announcing a filibuster "from the ski slopes of Davos." There was talk of a filibuster-proof 60-person GOP majority in the Senate. And now--what? Dean Barnett, currently blogging at Hugh Hewitt, shares the gloom.

If the election were held today, the Dems would hold all their Senate seats (if one categorizes, correctly I think, a Liberman victory as a "hold") and would pick up 5 seats with a minimum of difficulty: those held by Burns, Santorum, Chaffee, DeWine and the retiring Frist. That would make it 50-50, with Cheney as the tie-breaker. The troubles of Reps. DeLay, Ney, and Foley may make the Dems' 15-seat deficit a 12-seat deficit: a much easier mountain.

At this point, one of three things will happen. The GOP will fight to a stalemate and keep narrow control of at least one House. Or the Dems will fight and scratch for six Senate seats and 20 or so House seats and assume narrow majorities.

Or: napalm. Forty House seats, seven or eight Senate seats, in a landslide that results not from Foley (however Time and Newsweek would wish otherwise), but from a collective reaction to a dozen little things. Plus, Iraq.