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With this week's conclusion of the most important Conservative conference on the political calendar, CPAC, Conservatives are energized and ready to make gains in the upcoming 2010 election.

Fiery speech after fiery speech, enthusiastic Conservatives were served up heaping plates of red meat: anti-Government, anti-Democratic rhetoric sauced generously with rabid anti-Obama mania.

Few mentions were made of the contribution of failed GOP policies to the current state of the country. 

It would seem, by listening to many of the CPAC speeches, that there was not a Bush presidency, no Republican Congress that enabled the doubling of the national debt during the eight Bush years - and certainly no responsibility assumed for the state of the country, now commonly described as the Great Recession,  as Obama took over one year ago.

While this conference has traditionally been the playground of the far right, this year's angst-ridden national climate with high unemployment, generalized economic uncertainty and the presence of a "socialist" in the White House, seemed at times to unhinge the participants.

Over-the-top rhetoric aside, mid-term election cycles are almost always times for voters the vent anger at the Administration and party in power. 

Yet the heightened energy of the Conservative movement this year is cause for worry to Democrats in the Congress and running for other offices across the country.

Will the Democrats be able to ignite a similar wave of energy before the November election?  If not, Congress could very well tip to the right - and with it, the already poisoned political climate will only worsen.

Similarly, it is not at all clear that this Conservative energy will be totally beneficial for mainstream Republican candidates. 

Some of the anger fanned by the flames of CPAC was also directed at "RHINOS", "Republican in name only", i.e., traditional GOP politicians that are deemed to be too moderate or accommodating to the hated Democrats.

Already Sarah Palin, speaking at the earlier Tea Party Convention, said that moderate Republicans had to be challenged by "real" Conservatives in upcoming primaries.

All in all, this right-wing passion should make for a tremendously fascinating political season - an election cycle that is bound to surprise both Conservatives and Progressives.

NBCNews reports on the possible Conservative tide:

Reuters reports on Conservative excitement coming out of CPAC:

At an annual conference of grassroots conservatives, activists promised to crank up the pressure on Obama and his fellow Democrats and marveled at the political turnaround since he entered the White House in January 2009 on a wave of goodwill and high expectations.

Since then, Obama's approval ratings have slumped and his legislative agenda has stalled amid public unhappiness with the sputtering economy, high jobless rate and growing budget deficits.

"President Obama has lost his mojo," U.S. Representative Steve King said. "If we stand our ground as conservatives, he's not going to get it back."

With about 10,000 registered participants, this year's Conservative Political Action Conference was the largest and most festive yet and had to be moved to a larger Washington hotel.

"A year ago, this meeting was big and scared. Now it's big and excited," said anti-tax leader Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. He said Obama had proven his skill at his former job of community organizing.

"He has done a lot to organize conservatives," Norquist said.

FoxNews' Sunday morning show panelists discuss the GOP's prospects for 2010 and 2012:

Newsweek comments on the Democrat's predicament going into the 2010 mid-term elections:

...Now Democrats are bracing for a potential GOP takeover of the House, plus a loss of five to eight Senate seats, an outcome that would mirror the '94 election results, not a happy time for Democrats.

Instead of spending four and a half months wooing Sen. Olympia Snowe for a vote the Republican caucus would never allow, Obama's time would have been better spent playing the outside game and keeping his e-mail list of 13 million people engaged as a lobbying force. Instead, campaign top gun David Plouffe took a sabbatical to make money. That was his right, but it reflected rosy assumptions on Obama's part about how sweet reason could tame the partisan tiger.

Obama's tenure so far is strikingly similar to '93 and '94 when another young Democratic president entered office with high expectations and soon found himself down in the polls and battling a wave of conservative sentiment. The advisers around Obama would never admit it, but losing one or even both houses of Congress might be better for Obama than the gridlock paralyzing his agenda. History in our partisan age suggests that for a president to be truly successful and get big legislative achievements, a divided Congress may be necessary. Only then does each party have some stake in governing, and maneuvering room to compromise...

But Rick Santorum, former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, in a possible effort to court the Tea Party movement, faulted other GOP leaders for lack of leadership during their time in power:

And Democratic support groups - such as labor and immigration reform activists - seem oblivious to the volatile political reality in Washington, from Politico:

The news releases remain hopeful: Comprehensive immigration reform this spring! Employee Free Choice Act around the corner! And a new poll from President Barack Obama's pollster shows that Republican Sen. Scott Brown will enthusiastically support climate change legislation — if he knows what's good for him!

With Obama's top agenda item, health care legislation, near ruins and congressional Democrats on the defensive heading into this year's midterm elections, much of the sweeping liberal agenda some of Obama's supporters hoped for and his enemies feared has been deferred. The centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans necessary to end debate in the Senate show little appetite for hard votes. The White House and congressional leadership are pushing hard for populist financial sector regulations, something they can call a "jobs bill" and little else.

And yet in a surreal twilight, issues live on, fed by a kind of mutual dependency between the liberal interest groups that exist to advance them and the conservatives for whom opposing them is a potent rallying force. There is, say liberal leaders who suffered through the drought of the Bush years, no point in giving up.

"Our job is to continue to push for things that are good for workers," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told POLITICO last fall, reacting angrily to a question about whether the Employee Free Choice Act — which would expand unions' organizing power — was dead. "This our job. "Somebody says, 'You can't do it' so we say, 'We quit?' We can't do that. Our job is to continue to push for things that is good for workers."

That can-do spirit, in the face of apparent legislative impossibility, masks some anger at Obama and congressional Democrats. Labor leaders and immigration reform groups alike warn that their constituents will stay home in droves this fall. They bridle at the little slights, like the fact that immigration reform — a promised Year One priority — merited only a passing mention in the State of the Union address.

"The White House really blew it" with the speech, said Frank Sharry, the executive director of the Democratic-leaning immigration group America's Voice.

FoxNews star and Conservative icon Glenn Beck closes the CPAC convention with a Conservative call to arms:

The 2010 mid-term elections in November are critical to the fortunes of both parties - and the ability of the country to emerge from economic crisis into a new era of sustainable growth.

For the Democrats, the elections will determine the size of their majority or minority  in Congress, and with it, their ability to implement a wide-ranging agenda of reform.

The Republicans are seeing November as a 1994-like chance to wrest control of the Congress from the Democrats and block the Progressives from making any further gains.  Also at stake for the GOP will be its relationship to the Tea Party.

And of course, the fate of the Obama agenda is also at play. 

While the party in the White House almost always loses seats in mid-term elections, the scope of that loss will be a critical determinant of how much the President can do for the rest of his term to push forward with his myriad campaign promises.

In a series of new polls published this week, Americans across the country agree that Congress is a dismal failure - and that action on the people's priorities has taken a back seat to political wrangling and inside-the Beltway politics that have no relevancy to American families and their prospects for renewed prosperity.

Like parrots, politicos from both parties are now screeching "bipartisanship", "bipartisanship" as if the mere act of saying the word will create it.

Action on a positive agenda will be the real test.

But the politicians are not (all) dumb.  They also read the polls and see how angry people have become and how that anger may turn into scary - and unpredictable - 2010 election results.

The PBS NewsHour analyses the challenges to bipartisanship:

The Washington Post reports on the Democrat's strategy:

The emerging strategy seeks to take advantage of the partisan stalemate in Congress over Obama's nominees and major policy initiatives, and to turn the page on a year when the White House failed to secure passage of complicated health-care and energy legislation.

The idea is to make Republicans either vote for a series of more modest bills identified as popular with the public or explain to constituents this fall why they opposed them.

The decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to offer a pared-down jobs-creation bill and dare the GOP to oppose it is the most visible sign of the plan so far. White House officials and congressional staff members say it will be followed in coming weeks by a House vote to lift the antitrust exemption for insurance companies, measures to assist small businesses and extend unemployment benefits, and a proposal to levy fees on Wall Street banks that received bailout money.

One senior White House official called the strategy an attempt "to force progress," at a time when polls show that the public wants bipartisan cooperation.

"If they support the measures, great," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. "But if not, the votes will show their hypocrisy and obstruction, which will demonstrate something in itself."

Politco reports on a coming Conservative "Manifesto" (think a 2010 'Contract with America") that will serve as the GOP's electoral call to arms:

With conservatives grappling among themselves for control of their movement — and the Republican Party — a group of more than 80 prominent conservative thinkers are set to unveil their version of a mission statement for the right.

What they are calling “the Mount Vernon Statement” in homage to George Washington will be unveiled and signed Wednesday — on the eve of the annual gathering in Washington of the establishment right, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The big names attached to it include former Attorney General Ed Meese, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, Media Research Center leader Brent Bozell, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist and David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, which is putting on CPAC, among others.

Organizers would not immediately make the text of the statement available, but they billed it as the next generation of the 1960 “Sharon Statement.” That document, produced by a group of young conservative intellectuals including William F. Buckley Jr. and taking its name from Buckley’s Connecticut hometown, helped define the conservative movement for years.

It comes as the conservative establishment is feeling heat from independents who have soured on Democrats but aren’t ready to warm up to Republicans and from the tea party movement, an explosion of largely new conservative and libertarian activism that has directed its frustration at both parties and at the political system as a whole.

A number of competing initiatives are jockeying with the Mount Vernon Statement to define the conservative movement and the Republican Party as it heads into the crucial 2010 midterm elections

The White House is also getting ready for the 2010 elections.  If the President cannot push through his agenda through an election-year clogged Congress, he plans to use executive power to enact part of his plans.  The New York Times reports:

Mr. Obama has not given up hope of progress on Capitol Hill, aides said, and has scheduled a session with Republican leaders on health care later this month. But in the aftermath of a special election in Massachusetts that cost Democrats unilateral control of the Senate, the White House is getting ready to act on its own in the face of partisan gridlock heading into the midterm campaign.

“We are reviewing a list of presidential executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat. And Mr. Obama’s success this week in pressuring the Senate to confirm 27 nominations by threatening to use his recess appointment power demonstrated that executive authority can also be leveraged to force action by Congress.

Mr. Obama has already decided to create a bipartisan budget commission under his own authority after Congress refused to do so. His administration has signaled that it plans to use its discretion to soften enforcement of the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military, even as Congress considers repealing the law. And the Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with possible regulations on heat-trapping gases blamed for climate change, while a bill to cap such emissions languishes in the Senate.

Last night the Democrats celebrated a key vote in the Senate that opens that way for the health care bill to be debated by the full Senate.

But this morning, Republicans are back on the attack.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will lead the charge.  According to McClatchy:

"Make no mistake, the Democrat plan we'll vote on tonight would make life harder for the vast majority of Americans," said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "It raises their taxes. It raises their health care premiums. It cuts their Medicare. And it drives millions off of the private insurance they currently have."

On CNN this morning, McConnell called the Democratic approach to passing the bill "arrogant":

But beyond antipathy to all things Obama, the Republicans in Congress are being driven by the right-wing base of their Party - a critical constituency for the GOP as it works towards consolidating  support and driving voter excitement for 2010. 

As an example, here's Lou Dobbs on his radio show calling for street demonstrations: