From a Hill veteran reader:

When historians look back on the 2006 midterms and the Democratic sweep of both the House and Senate, they will look back on Friday, September 29th as the day that sealed the GOP's fate:

-- The Mark Foley resignation is huge. It turns a safe GOP seat into a seat that is now a likely Democratic pickup, and will demand at a minimum party resources that Ken Mehlman would have wanted to deploy elsewhere. You take the Foley seat and add it to the Delay, Ney, and Kolbe seats, those are four seats where GOP incompetence and scandal has converted from sure GOP seats to likely Dem pickups (the Kolbe seat is where Jim Kolbe is retiring and a KKK symphathizer is the GOP nominee).

More importantly, as unfair as it is, this scandal will resonate along the lines of the House banking scandal and free ice deliveries that doomed the Dems in 1994. The party of family values had a Member in its leadership who was inveighing against Internet porn at day, but using it to communicate with minors at night. This is bad, bad, bad for the GOP image;

-- The Woodward book will suck up all the oxygen on TV and talk radio for the next week; a whole week of "free media" for the Dem argument that the Bushies have irrevocably screwed up Iraq; any GOP focus on terrorism next week will be lost;

-- Finally, rumors tonight (reported on NBC News) of a possible military coup in Baghdad, prompting the sudden imposition of a citywide curfew.

I was retaining skepticism on Dem prospects until today. But this is it -- the GOP is in for a shellacking on November 7th.

Update: The NBC Nightly News video has the report of an alleged Iraqi military coup plot, which supposedly did not get beyond the planning stage. Didn't we already know about this? Posted by Laura at September 29, 2006 08:01 PM...http://tinyurl.com/r9mrq
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