"Had enough?"

That, claims Newt Gingrich in Time, is the slogan Democrats should be using to run against Republican incumbents this Fall:

if the elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who masterminded the 1994 elections that brought Republicans to power on promises of revolutionizing the way Washington is run, told Time that his party has so bungled the job of governing that the best campaign slogan for Democrats today could be boiled down to just two words: "Had enough?"

...hardly anybody in the GOP camp seems anxious to address the historic event that transpired this month out on the high plains and now threatens to roll eastward, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is, of course, abortion. For the party of the elephant, the new South Dakota law - which prohibits the procedure for every woman in the state, unless she is dying - is truly the elephant in the room.

It puts Republican politicians, especially those seeking the 2008 presidential nomination, squarely on the spot. If they side with conservatives - who tend to vote heavily in the primaries, and who generally hope that the South Dakota law will be a weapon to overturn Roe v. Wade - they risk alienating the independent voters who often swing November elections. The swing people generally desire that the right to legal abortion, as codified by Roe, be sustained.

That explains why not a single Republican with White House aspirations has declared that the South Dakota law - passed by a Republican legislature, and signed on March 6 by a Republican governor - should be the model for an ultimate ban on abortions nationwide. None bring up the law at all; they have to be asked first.

Even ardent foes of abortion acknowledge that the issue is dicey. In the words of Jeffrey Bell, a veteran Washington activist who has worked with religious conservatives, "This is a real curveball that people weren't expecting. I'd understand if strategists might not want their [GOP] clients to say, 'Yeah, South Dakota, bring it on!' They don't know whether the public has moved that far."

Jack Pitney, a former national Republican official and Capitol Hill staffer who closely tracks GOP politics, said the other day: "This [abortion law] is a delicate situation for the Republicans. It makes a lot of them nervous. It's one thing to just talk about banning abortion - and they do that all the time, because it's a great way to fire up the base and raise money. But it's another thing to actually ban abortion nationwide.

"Because that would raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions that could hurt the party politically - such as, if this is truly a crime, whom do you jail? Very few Republican candidates want to answer that question."

[Jeffrey] Bell, the Washington activist, says the current conservative discomfiture needs to be put in perspective.

"Look at the progress we've made since 1992," he said. "Back then, we had the 'year of the woman,' when all these pro-choice Democrats got elected to the Senate, and Bill Clinton got elected president, and there was talk of passing a national law modeled on Roe. The pro-life people in the Republican party were absolutely pathetic.

"Today? Republicans have all three branches, and Democrats are so worried [about appealing to cultural conservatives] that they recruit Bob Casey Jr., a pro-lifer, to run for the Senate in Pennsylvania. The Democrats and the pro-choice people are on the defensive in ways they've never been before."

Perhaps. But law professor and conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds contends that the new abortion debate "will actually be bad for the Republicans. When the topic is defense, the Democrats lose. When it's sex, the Republicans lose."

Back to Time:

Voters have plenty to take out on Republican candidates this year—ethics scandals, the g.o.p.'s failure to curb spending, the government's inept response to Hurricane Katrina, a confusing new prescription-drug program for seniors and, more than anything else, an unpopular President who is fighting an unpopular war. Iraq could make a vulnerability of the Republicans' greatest asset, the security issue.

Where does all this leave the people who voted for Bush because of the war?

War?

What war? The word is so misused that it has become vague. While I like to talk about ending the "Culture War," the activists on both sides always seem to be winning against ordinary people who don't like politicizing the personal. It's tough to fight a war in Iraq and a war on terror when people are told they must take "sides" in, well, sex wars.

I'm wondering whether the voting public has developed general battle fatigue.

If so, the party that wins this Fall might be the one that shuts up the loudest.