Optimism?

If you ignore the fact that redistricting will fuck us for years, you can read a column like this one by Harold Meyerson and get downright giddy about our prospects for '06.

The GOP's Bankruptcy of Ideas
By Harold MeyersonWednesday, May 10, 2006; Page A25

There's no concealing the Republican collapse. In a USA Today-Gallup poll released this week, the president's approval rating had deflated to a dismal 31 percent -- and to just 52 percent among conservatives. Other recent polls have shown that the public prefers shifting congressional control to the Democrats by margins as high as 17 percent. Numbers can change, of course, but it's hard to see what the Republicans can do to reverse this tsunami. They can mount an October surprise attack on Iran, but that would require someone making a convincing public case that Iran poses an imminent threat to us and that preemptive war is the only solution. And who, in the wake of the deceptions with which they justified their war in Iraq, has the credibility to do that? Bush? Cheney? Rumsfeld? These guys have turned themselves into Lucy holding the football, while the American people no longer afford them a Charlie Brown benefit of the doubt.

[...]

In a recent spate of interviews, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi has emphasized her party's fast-forward version of its first Hundred Days in power -- in this case, what the Democrats would do in their first week running Congress. They would raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1997. They would repeal the section of the Medicare drug plan that forbids the government from negotiating lower prices with the drug industry. They would fully implement the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, and they would restore the congressional rule, suspended by Republicans, requiring that all new programs be paid for by a specific new spending source or offset by a commensurate cut in another program.

Pelosi doesn't deny that Congress would resume its oversight functions, but she has made clear that any decision to impeach anybody (which is not on her agenda) would be hers and the caucus's -- not John Conyers's, certainly not the Democratic blogosphere's.