We’ve heard the reasons that Democrats are supposed to be doomed this November. President Obama’s approval ratings are at an all-time low and candidates from his party have opted to run away from the POTUS’ record (although as I argued a couple weeks ago, this is a cowardly mistake). Pro-Republican district gerrymandering has made few House races competitive. And of course, liberals tend to avoid the polls during midterms – to their own detriment.

This latter pattern led the President to observe of his base earlier this year, “We know how to win national elections…But all too often it’s during these midterms where we end up getting ourselves into trouble, because I guess we don’t think it’s sexy enough.” Aspirational attractiveness aside, every election is critically important and the most obvious solution is for Democrats to swarm the polls less than two months from now.

Midterms tend to be viewed, both individually and in the eyes of media pundits, as a referendum on the sitting President. But other writers and thinkers offer a deeper psychological assessment of these elections. Earlier this week in a piece entitled, “Obama Isn’t Finished Yet,” New York Times Op-Ed Contributor James Mann, writes:

“We might call this a kind of collective projection. We claim that a president is tired or looks tired, when what we really mean is that we are tired of him…By his sixth year in office, any president is ridiculously overexposed. We’ve seen him and heard him far too many times.

During his early years, a president naturally enjoys the hopes of his supporters; they suppress any disappointments they feel in the interests of winning the White House again. While in a second term, even his strongest supporters feel freer to express their disenchantment.”

As someone who has struggled with a practical Obama who has at times failed to live up to the “hope and change” hype of 2008 (and realistically, how could he not?), this argument makes a huge amount of sense. And if liberals are able to recognize and call out Presidential fatigue, we should also be able to mobilize against our self-defeating tendency to let it swallow all other compelling interests during the midterms. After all there’s nothing “sexier” in my own leftist circles than circumventing expected convention.

But I would also offer that there’s another reason why Democratic prospects in November might be rosier they appear. And that reason is the inept messaging and strategy of the Republican Party, which has followed the same losing general election primer since 2008 (2010 midterm success aside):

1. Pander to the base during primary season, with a series of ideological purity tests that purge anyone remotely palatable to a demographic cross-section.
2. Once a nomination has been secured, try to move the candidate back to the center, even if they’ve spent months being “severely conservative” (I’m looking at you Romney).
3. Blame the media for this hoax failing to fool anybody.
4. Repeat.

Midterms elections can be a sigh of relief for GOP strategists forced to march up and off the usual cliff. With no Presidential contest to engage, this defeatist plan of action is executed on micro levels (Senate elections being the largest field) where ideological hegemony affords it a greater rate of success.

But this one could be different. The middle class knows it’s getting a raw deal. We know that corporations are experiencing nearly all the economic gains while Congress sits on its hands. Actually, it would be better if House leadership were just plain old inactive. Instead, we get Speaker John Boehner characterized by Reuters as expressing “his dissatisfaction with a chronically high jobless rate and complained of a ‘very sick idea’ that the unemployed would ‘rather just sit around.’

Women are tired of pay inequity (especially given their status as the breadwinners in 40 percent of American households), the culturally accepted misogyny and the consistent invasions into our reproductive decisions. I know that when the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Hobby’s Lobby’s corporate religious objections to certain forms of contraception trumped a woman’s individual right to access them, it was a turning point for many of us.

And if there’re any remaining immigrant groups who fail to understand the Republican party’s open hostility to anything that looks like humanity (let alone progress), I’d be quite amazed.

A variety of media outlets already bespeak a lack of Democratic gain in the House as a foregone conclusion, with chances of retaining a Senate majority only slightly less remote. But that prediction discounts the most important variable: us. Eric Cantor anyone? Let’s give the heads something to talk about.

After a several month hiatus, September heralds the return of The Conversation, The New York Times debate series featuring regular columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins. While the banter is often playful, the ideological divisions of the two pundits are serious and stark. Brooks represents what he thinks is the moderate, humanist right (another column for another time), while Collins takes up the mantle of the frustrated left.

The liberal grievances that Collins bespeaks in deceptively simple, pointed prose are sundry and do not always land at the feet of the intractable, regressive GOP. Collins’ voice has been notable in her willingness to take on cowering Democratic leadership, challenging them to stand for common-sense legislation around issues such as gun reform, immigration, health care and women’s rights. She doesn’t let either party off the hook for our nation’s stagnant and conflicted approach to social and economic progress. And she does so in approachable language that’s as clearheaded as it is egalitarian. Take this gem from Collin’s 2009 book, America’s Women:

“The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.”

Collins dares all Americans to take a certain level of responsibility for our situation. If we don’t like the way things work, we are at least partly complicit in tolerating the status quo. And this week, she holds our feet to the fire once again in her latestConversation with Brooks, “Our Reluctant National Security President.” After the conservative Brooks offers yet another rote, uninspired argument against America’s “leadership problem” under President Obama (to be fair, he lumps W and Clinton in this bucket as well), Collins succinctly destroys it. She writes:

“You’re looking at a decline of presidential leadership since World War II. I see a western world that has learned painfully, over and over again, how impossible it is to fight a ground war in other people’s countries. Particularly on a planet where your friends aren’t the only ones with weapons of mass destruction.

So maybe it’s not the presidents who have changed, but the world they confront.”

Yes! And the subtext embedded in this truth bomb (bombs are so much more enticing when they come in the form of learned dissent) is an indictment of a democratic leadership that seems determined to remain on the defensive, despite:

1. Being, with few exceptions, aligned with the wishes of the voting public (such as nonintervention in foreign conflicts that do not directly and immediately impact our national security).
2. Repeatedly failing to learn by case study (health care reform, immigration, the rollback of female reproductive rights) that the softer voices in the room are not heard. Those who talk loudest and most repetitively often win the messaging war.

The Democratic candidates presently running from the record of Obama, which includes significant economic recovery, a solid record in the war on terrorism (all crazy things Summer 2014 aside) and the greatest expansion to the social safety net in a generation, would do well to remember that every time they bob and weave, choosing “centrist” pandering over countermessaging, a soldier of Karl Rove gets his or her wings. And it allows the tone of the conversation to drift ever farther to the right.

Where Brooks views a lack of Presidential machismo as the ludicrous underpinning for our modern inability to order countries around, Collins sees a new reality. One in which America’s role – for financial, humanitarian, and yes geopolitical reasons – must be different. Most Democrats privately agree with this assessment.

One of the most important questions facing the party in the run up to the November elections is “Will we retain a Senate majority?” Instead, it ought to be, “Can we dispense with fear and expediency long enough to talk to voters and show them the real differences that exist between left and right?” The words don’t have to be lofty and long-winded as Collin’s continuous example proves. We need to do more than hold onto the Chamber. We need to change the conversation.