July, going on November

President Obama and Congress have just rounded the final bend in the 2010 racetrack and entered the homestretch.

Here’s how to tell.

{mosads}On Sunday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged there was “no doubt” that Republicans could retake control of the House. The following morning, Rep Eric Cantor (Va.), the GOP’s chief whip in the House, seized on Gibbs’s words but went further, saying, “When we regain the House — because I do think we will retake the majority — the president will have to deal with us.”

So by Monday, both sides of the aisle were saying explicitly what has been implicit and hinted at in many public utterances for a while.

Politicians tend to avoid predictions far from an election, for there is not much advantage and plenty of danger in handing over a predictive hostage to fortune.

But close to polling day, expressing confidence in victory or suggesting alarm at the possibility of defeat can galvanize a party’s base. Gibbs mulling a Republican House takeaway could fire up disillusioned and listless Dems. Equally, Cantor predicting a win might be calculated to enthuse Republicans.

As if to ram home the idea that Democrats now have their backs against the electoral wall, the president called leading senators of his party to the White House on Tuesday to discuss their agenda.

Afterward, the president emerged with a call to press ahead, and quickly, on a financial regulatory reform bill now that three Republicans have made its passage possible. But the proximate cause of the confabulation was Election Day looming over the horizon beyond summer recess.

Obama and his party want to check off a number of legislative achievements before the break — extending unemployment insurance benefits, financing the war in Afghanistan, confirming a new Supreme Court justice — but all such achievements are colored by electoral considerations this close to polling day.

There was about Tuesday’s White House meeting the flavor of defiance, of determination to take urgent action and win. The action is made urgent at least as much by the elections as by the merits of the legislation’s content.

From now on, every news event about Congress will be, at bottom, news about the midterm elections; every speech will be a stump speech; every press release will be — implicitly, anyway — a fundraiser. Yes, yes, we know; the campaign is continuous, so reelection is never far from the frontal lobe of the astute politician. But campaigns have trajectories. It’s different today. You can feel it.