Ok... I was talking about what pundits and semi-neutral sources have predicted, NOT the Carvilles et al. I laughed when Terry McAuliffe said he was taking out Jeb Bush and his little boy got spanked bad on election day.
A complicating factor is that the Democrats were like 5 seats away from taking over the House in 2002, so predicting a Democrat takeover knowing the historical record on mid-term elections was not a dramatic prediction. People kept calling it the "Seinfeld election", the election about nothing, and since the polling see-sawed and showed incumbents strong they didn't know what to make of it. And then redistricting and security-minded voters voted Republican all over the country, and it was a good night.
The bottom line is this: If the dems had strong candidates who were not so far on the fringes, and had jettisoned people like Pelosi from the mainstream...I would be more worried. But when it comes to the lesser of two evils, better the evil you know in these perilous times than the evil that is completely unhinged.
I think that many politicians are misreading the tea leaves. They don't want us to be softer, they want us to speed it up.