By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Showing new signs of life after the embarrassing debacle in New York's 23rd Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions and the National Republican Congressional Committee are already pounding some senior Democrats whose vote in favor of Nancy Pelosi's healthcare package may make then vulnerable at the next election.

In new ads designed to run in North Dakota, Arkansas and South Carolina, the committee is raising the issue of the votes Democrats Earl Pomeroy, Vic Snyder and John Spratt cast in favor of Pelosicare by using the words of fellow Democrats who voted against it:

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pivot from healthcare to jobs was not quite as smooth as she had hoped.

Buffeted by increases in the unemployment figures in the weeks and months since the stimulus bill passed and was signed into law, the Democrats had hoped to have a healthcare bill to talk about at the next election in order to blunt criticism that they have mismanaged the economy.

Now it's beginning to look like it won't do much good. Most all of the national surveys cite jobs or "jobs and the economy" as the No. 1 issue among likely voters in the next election. And try as she might to change the subject, Pelosi still has some unfinished healthcare business on her side of the Capitol.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

There were few economists who really believed, despite the promises that the money would go to shovel ready projects that could begin immediately once the funding came through, that the stimulus would really create any net jobs. But something needed to be done, they said, especially in light of the Obama administration forecast that, without it, unemployment would rise about 9 percent for the first time in several decades.

Well, in what must have come as a surprise to the White House, they got both: the stimulus and unemployment up over 9 percent for the first time since the Reagan recession of the early 1980s.

It was a neat trick, managing to achieve both—but an even neater trick was the White House's invention of the idea that the impact of the stimulus be measured but the number of jobs "created or saved" by the federal largess pouring out of the treasury in its wake.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Nancy Pelosi's successful effort to get healthcare through the U.S. House of Representatives provided the Democrats with a short-term political victory that blunted the impact of the party's losses in the 2009 election. That the bill passed with almost the barest number of "Aye" votes required suggests the party, and the legislation, still has rough sledding ahead.

Whether these elections were a repudiation of Obama and the Democrats is not clear. Supporters of the president argue they were not while his opponents say they were. Most interesting, however, is the lessons each party is drawing from what happened in New Jersey and New York and in Virginia which, even at this late date, deserve additional attention.

Nathan Daschle, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, whose candidates got thumped on Nov. 3, attributed their defeats to local issues, not the national climate. Therefore, he suggested, Democrats running for governor in 2010 would do best to stay focused on local issues.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Having failed in his efforts to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Barack Obama has now compounded his problem by announcing that the September 11 plotters held there will be brought to the United States for trial.

No one, least of all the family members of those whose blood is on the terrorists' hands, wants them in this country. Debra Burlingame, whose brother was the pilot of the American Airlines plan that was crashed into the Pentagon, called the prospective trial "a travesty."

Burlingame, who believes a military tribunal is the proper venue for such a proceeding, in a statement released to the press held out the likelihood of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed holding forth in open court, "mocking his victims, exulting in the suffering of their families, ridiculing the judge, his lawyers and the American justice system, and worst of all, rallying his jihad brothers to kill more Americans."

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The venerable Gallup organization reports that, according to its latest national survey, registered voters now favor the Republicans over the Democrats on the congressional generic ballot test by a margin of four points, 48 percent to 44 percent.

For the Democrats, particularly in the White House, this is not good news as it reflects a pronounced move away from President Obama and his policies at a particularly critical juncture. Key to the swing is the shift in attitude by independent voters who, while not necessarily willing to call themselves Republicans, are saying they are willing to vote that way in the next national election.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In the early '90s the Republican march to majority included the idea that it was time to impose term limits on members of the U.S. House and Senate. A part of the Contract with America, term limits died thanks in part to a disagreement among its supporters over just what those terms should be.

It also didn't help the cause that those who followed Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey as leaders of the House GOP determined that voluntarily ceding power to other people might not be the most prudent of ideas, especially after the party had spent 40 years in the political wilderness.