Everybody, even White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, agrees that Republicans are going to pick up seats in the House and Senate elections this year.
The disagreement is about how many.
Some compare 2010 to 1994, when Republicans picked up 52 House seats and won majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. That was a reaction to the big government programs of the first two years of the Clinton administration.
Others compare this year to 1982, when Democrats picked up 26 House seats and recaptured effective control of the House two years after Ronald Reagan was elected president. That was a recession year, with unemployment even higher than it is now.
Let me put another off-year election on the table for comparison: 1966. Like 1994, this wasn't a year of hard economic times. But it was a year when a Democratic president's war in Asia was starting to cause unease and some opposition within his own party, as is happening now.
Vice President Biden's latest fundraising e-mail asks for help battling "corporate interests." "By spending an unprecedented amount of cash to support Republicans," Biden writes, "they're doing their best to buy their way back into power."
This is the style of Obama's White House: Never grant that your opponents disagree in good faith and always accuse them of corruption. Beyond being unfair, it's dishonest, because it ignores the White House's coziness with corporate lobbyists.
It now seems that Mr. and Mrs. Sherrod inflicted quite a bit of pain and suffering on their own -- and on some of the very people Mr. Sherrod described as "our own" in a speech earlier this year -- at New Communities, Inc. (NCI). The group is described at the Rural Development Leadership Network's web site as "the land trust that Shirley and Charles Sherrod established, with other black farm families in the 1960s."
Senate Democrats announced Tuesday they are abandoning plans to take up an energy and oil spill response bill before the August recess, saying they would make another attempt in the fall.
The decision was made when Democrats failed to win enough support to pass anything before the Senate adjourns Friday for a five-week recess.
"We tried jujitsu, we tried yoga. We tried everything we can with Republicans to get them to come along with us and be reasonable," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters.
The Obama administration's push to raise taxes for Americans in the highest income brackets is already causing the White House election-year headaches.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner triggered a rapid response from the GOP when he told ABC News, "It makes sense to let those tax cuts that only go to two percent of the highest-earning Americans in the country expire as scheduled."
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