"I don’t think people are open to the ‘Bush sucks’ chant anymore"

“We will not allow this to be an election just about Democrats,” said Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in an interview.

“If we allow this election to simply be a referendum on us, and not be one in which we remind the electorate where Republicans left the country when Barack Obama took office … then we will face the consequences of not having an election of contrasts,” Menendez said. “If we have an election of contrasts, which we clearly will — our candidates fully understand that this will be an election of contrasts in each and every state — we will fare well.”…

Republican veterans such as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association who was Republican National Committee Chairman in 1994 when the GOP retook the House, sound nearly giddy with optimism.

“We were not in this good of shape when I was chairman in the end of 93 and the beginning of 94,” Barbour said in a phone interview. “The public wasn’t as mad at the Democrats … the public wasn’t afraid of what the Clinton administration was doing in the sense of the long-term effects on American economic policy, tax policy, spending policy, trade policy.”