Too optimistic about 2012? This will cure you

File this under "Well, Crap."

Kimberley Strassel has a real upper of a column at the Wall Street Journal today: "Reimagining Speaker Pelosi."

While the GOP and the Right are focused on the fight for the White House and getting rid of President Obama, there's a creeping political menace that too many are not seeing: The 2010 takeover of the House could be short-lived.

Conservatives are by nature optimists. They are intensely focused on retaking the White House and the Senate. But what if, in that optimism, they are missing a growing threat?

That threat is to the House of Representatives. Republicans claimed a sweeping victory there in 2010, a win that stopped President Obama's marauding legislative agenda. Yet that has led to a certain Republican nonchalance about the House in 2012.

What the optimists are missing is that the House remains the linchpin of all their future ambitions. A Republican presidency will mean little with Speaker Nancy Pelosi redux. Mr. Obama may well win re-election. What leverage will a Republican-run Senate have in the face of that, and a Democratic House? Or consider the possibility that Republicans botch both the Oval Office and the Senate.

True, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), under Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, is aware of the challenge and is energetically fund-raising and recruiting. True, the party is already coaching its newer members about the rigors of re-election. And true, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are going all out to collect money for their members. The speaker alone raised some $46 million in 2011—nearly double his take for the entire last election cycle.

What Messrs. Boehner and Cantor know is that they'll need all this, and more. The House is no sure thing.

Read the whole thing for a sobering account of what could happen if the Right and the GOP don't get their act together.