If there is a recession this year, the Democrats cannot lose. They can only beat themselves.

[bluestateguy]

If this economy slips into recession, it will be next to impossible for the Republican nominee to make a convincing argument that their reign should be continued. It won't matter even if casualties in Iraq drop to zero. A recession would only make it even easier for Democrats to make this election about the issues they want to make it about: jobs, education, housing, health care, education. And if the other side nominates John McCain, they can't use the tax issue because he voted against the Bush tax cuts. They also can't use immigration because he was the lead sponsor of that God-awful Cheap Labor/Amnesty bill.

If there is a recession, the Democrats can only beat themselves.

Of course, this is the Democratic Party we are talking about here.

[TwilightZone]

1. I think we're already there, even without a recession.

We won a ton of races in 2006 and lost few, if any, incumbent seats. Democratic voter self-identification is up, Republicans are down, and Independents are leaning more left than before.

I think our prospects are extremely good, assuming that we can defy Will Rogers.

[nosmokes]

2. That's not a comforting thought for most democrats ya know...

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. This slide has been going on for a long time.

It started, as far as I could tell, with the inflation of the past four decades, and as far as jobs getting scarce and wages stagnating against inflation, I'd say it started about 1995. That was a long time ago.

It was documented in "Roger and Me" by Michael Moore, in Michigan, about the closing of the plants and our manufacturing infrastructure being shut down and shipped to Mexico and then China. The race to the bottom as it is called.

[Liberal In Texas]

4. We are very good about beating ourselves.

We've had a lot of practice.

As Will Rogers once said, "I Don't Belong To Any Organized Party: I'm A Democrat."

But that disorganization gives us our strength. The other "party" acts like Nazis, walking in lock-step and marching off the cliff like lemmings. We quarrel and get pissed off and sometimes walk away. But our strength is that we don't have one "talking point" that we have to rely on.

We think. We read. We listen.

We are democrats that sometimes sabotage ourselves. But if we didn't, we wouldn't be democrats and we wouldn't be looking out for the best for our fellow man and ourselves.

-L

[Hidden Stillness]

5. They Will Have to Show They Understand--Explain Problem Correctly, Propose Real Programs

Democrats will only win on this issue, if they talk about it correctly. C-SPAN played a speech tonight of a rally Friday afternoon I think it was, of Hillary Clinton before a union audience at Commerce, Calif. Finally, she gave some proposals that were not all "tax cuts," "incentives," corporate bailouts, etc., corporate interest only, but now included a plan to give some $70 billion to the States to help with low-income home heating programs, the mortgage/credit crisis, an extension of unemployment insurance, and other things that releated to the people, and not always just to the damn executives and investors. It got huge applause. Anyone who proposes any kind of concrete help for the suffering people will get a great response. Programs, not tax cuts.

Of course, there is something very tricky they have to overcome: here in the Midwest, where we already have recession at least, we know very well what started this disastrous cascade of lost manufacturing base, and it was the Clinton/Gore NAFTA and GATT, etc., during the 1990s, as bad as the Reagan recession of the 1980s. This makes a very easy attack on all Democrats who supported all of these horrible "free" "trade" (global investment deregulation) deals--and they all did, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, to Johnny Hedge-Fund the predatory-loan profiteer. They will have to explain why they are now suddenly not like corporate Republicans, when of course up to now, they are.