Anybody who reads this blog regularly knows that I am not buying the whole "Democrats will take back the House" meme. There are lots of reasons not to believe it, not the least of which is that Democrats are always on the "brink of regaining power".

The polls keep suggesting that Republicans could be in for a historic drubbing. And their usual advantage--competence on national security--is constantly being challenged by new revelations about bungling in Iraq. But top Republican officials maintain an eerie, Zen-like calm. They insist that the prospects for their congressional candidates in November's midterms have never been as bad as advertised and are getting better by the day. Those are party operatives and political savants whose job it is to anticipate trouble. But much of the time they seem so placid, you wonder whether they know something.

Yeah--they know how elections are won.

The Democrats are simply hoping that the Republican voters don't show up this year, as attested to by Rahm Emmanuel's remark.

...G.O.P. voters have been more certain to vote than Democrats--meaning that the party tends to perform better than the final opinion polls suggest. Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, head of the House Democrats' campaign committee, recently told TIME that gap had counted for as much as 5 to 7 points for the Republicans. But he thinks this election year might be different. "Their voters are unhappy," he says. "They're despondent about a failed President."

I always get a kick out of the Democrats propensity to make statements like this-as if they have the pulse of conservatives much less the country.

Hope is not a strategy, and Emmanuel must have gone white as a sheet when he saw this poll.