This is prime time for Obama to be retained as President and for the Democrats to take back control of the House of Representatives.

It’s no secret that DC politics have all the popularity of the flu right now, and the Democrats are determined to capitalize on this opportunity to gain control.  Seeing as how they have the majority in the Senate, winning the House would put them in the driver’s seat for the immediate future.  It will be difficult, requiring them to take 25 seats currently held by Republicans, but it’s not utterly impossible.

One thing the Democrats are doing is a tactic the Republicans found successful in 2010 — they are recruiting people to run for office who have ties to their community but don’t necessarily have any political experience.  Their big argument is that they’re not politicians concerned about party ideologies and are focused on problem solving, not playing party politics.

The new maps, some of which may not be finished until mid-late summer, will be more telling of how these races will turn out.  The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has selected and will be supporting 18 candidates thus far.  These candidates will be leading the drive to 25 and will be key in garnering enough seats to push their party back into the majority, so we can stop playing party politics and start getting things done.

One issue that must be faced before the Democrats will be taking anything is the issue of the economy.  We’ve heard a lot about the economy being President Obama’s weak spot, and his inadequacy here could influence some voters to choose Republican by tying together Obama’s economic struggles and the Democrat’s party name.  I, however, would point to the fact that Clinton had a Democratic house and Senate and is regarded as one of the better Presidents in the history of the United States.

In those years where the Democrats held all of Congress as well as the Presidency, they were able to create almost six million jobs and the economy had the lowest unemployment and inflation rates of the past quarter-century.  I’m not naive enough to expect this kind of return on a Democratic stranglehold of DC in the coming years, but I do think things would get a lot better a lot quicker if we stopped worrying about party lines being crossed and simply do what’s right.