" A few veteran Washington Democrats are having this recurring nightmare: First they capture control of the House of Representatives on Nov. 6. Then they celebrate. Then chaos ensues.

The odds are strongly in favor of a Democratic House triumph in the midterm elections. That's why a dozen or so current members of the party are already angling for a leadership post in the next Congress. The current top Democrat, Nancy Pelosi of California, has been an effective leader but seems also to have become a political albatross as more and more Democrats, under pressure from Republicans and their own left wing, pledge to vote against her as House speaker.

If her support continues to wane, the consequences for Democrats could be serious. It's hard to exaggerate the importance of leadership of a Democratic caucus filled with members who have never been in the majority or shown legislative prowess. The House is likely to be the only U.S. government body that the Democrats control and will shape ferocious battles with President Donald Trump, maybe including impeachment, that will set the stage for the next presidential election.

The qualities that make a good congressional leader are often misunderstood. Successful modern speakers, from Sam Rayburn in the 1940s and 1950s, to Tip O'Neill, Pelosi and John Boehner a generation later, all possess keen political instincts and the discipline and subtlety of judgment to harness them. Bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich, who was speaker from 1995-99, and policy specialists like the current Speaker Paul Ryan have failed.

Other requisites for an effective speaker are the ability to count votes, which is harder than it looks; to craft an agenda that keeps cohesion and protects marginal incumbents; to be tough (the former Democratic House luminary and present Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel once told me that the only person who could intimidate him was Pelosi) and, in these times, to be an effective public voice.

One largely irrelevant factor is ideology; others can do the vision thing.

Pelosi meets all these requirements except one: excelling in the public role. So would the No. 2 Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland. But if the clamor is for a new, fresh face, it wouldn't work to replace a 78-year-old woman with a 79-year-old man.

There may well be younger Democrats with the potential to rise to the challenge, but few, if any, have yet demonstrated the skills required.

The majority party in the House has almost unchecked power to control the legislative calendar. With Trump in the White House and the Senate in Republican hands, expectations for legislative accomplishments would be minimal. But frustrated liberals will demand actions that may not sit well with new Democrats from places like Kentucky or Texas, and with a slim majority they won't be able to afford to lose anyone. Without smart and experienced leaders who can navigate that conflict, the Democrats are unlikely to stay in power for long.

The Trump administration offers so many targets for corruption investigations that there will be an insatiable appetite for an orgy of probes, and there need to be serious inquiries into demonstrated malfeasance. But the Democrats will make a mistake if they emulate the partisan witch hunts of Republicans like Devin Nunes, Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan. A strong leadership would impose needed restraints.

If there's a compelling case for impeachment, as seems likely, there are two models. In 1973, Democratic congressional leaders fended off a few left-wing members who demanded a rush to impeachment before the country was ready for it, paving the way for a bipartisan, historic effort that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation a year later. In 1998 by contrast, the absence of such measured consideration facilitated a travesty against President Bill Clinton that left him in office and actually boosted his popularity.

If Democrats jettison Pelosi in favor of new leaders, they'll need to consider African-Americans like Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Cedric Richmond of Louisiana and Karen Bass of California, who was once speaker of the California Assembly, and Latinos like Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Several women are seen as potential leaders, especially Cheri Bustos of Illinois and Katherine Clark of Massachusetts. Another name frequently cited is that of Adam Schiff, a nine-term California lawmaker who skillfully countered Republican demagoguery on the Intelligence Committee in the present Congress.

These are quality members, but none are tested, and 20 percent of the Democrats who vote for a leader will be freshmen with no experience. "

" President Donald Trump’s purported breakthrough in relations with North Korea seems to have failed. Far from dismantling his country’s nuclear program, Kim Jong Un is still expanding his arsenal. He’s aiming to undermine international unity over sanctions, planning summits this month with leaders from China and South Korea. And the United States recently canceled a visit to North Korea by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, saying the trip would be a waste of time.

None of this is very surprising. At the same time, it doesn’t mean the cause is hopeless. Despite these setbacks, the United States and its allies should stay engaged.

Disappointment was to be expected because Kim conceded next to nothing in his summit with Trump, pledging only to work toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula — a formula that implies the removal of U.S. forces — and only after striking a comprehensive peace agreement with Washington. Any such outcome is years away, and Kim will hope in the meantime to gain acceptance of North Korea as an unofficial nuclear power.

Trump has only himself to blame for gaining no concrete concessions from Pyongyang, then declaring one of the world’s most devilish geopolitical problems solved.

Nonetheless, Kim can’t revert to the pre-summit status quo. State media have celebrated the recent contacts and Kim’s promise that they’ll promote trade and development. He has staked his legitimacy on improving his country’s dire living standards. Estimates suggest that nearly three-quarters of North Koreans now derive some of their income from markets of one kind or another. A taste of economic liberty is apt to create an appetite for more. North Korea’s command-and-control model is under internal assault.

Also, both sides know what it would take to restart negotiations. The United States will have to join South Korea in declaring that the Korean War, which never formally ceased, is over. And North Korea will at a minimum have to provide an inventory of its nuclear and missile programs and agree to open them to inspections.

For this to work, Trump will have to convince Kim that North Korea cannot avoid coming to terms with the United States — which means, in turn, closer U.S. coordination with China and, especially, South Korea. This should be possible, despite suggestions from Trump that Beijing is encouraging the North’s recalcitrance. China’s leaders don’t want to flout United Nations sanctions openly; their interest is in seeing talks progress to the point where restrictions are officially lifted.

A similar logic holds true for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, whose efforts have been indispensable in reducing tensions on the peninsula. He clearly wants to move toward reconciliation with the North faster than the United States does, but no lasting stability will be achieved if South Korea minimizes U.S. security concerns or tries to strike a separate peace.

The more daylight the South Korean president allows between Seoul and Washington, the harder it will be to achieve his own objectives. The same goes, just as before, for the United States: To engage effectively with North Korea, the Trump administration must act patiently, methodically and in concert with others.

" WASHINGTON — Journalist Bob Woodward’s new book and an op-ed by an anonymous administration official portray President Trump as dangerously capricious and amoral, exhibiting textbook symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and behaving in ways that suggest, to some, early signs of age-related dementia.

But you knew that.

We’ve all known about Trump from the beginning. We’ve known that he was entirely unfit to hold any public office, much less wield the awesome powers of the presidency, regardless of what political views he might have. Trump demonstrates this fact literally every single day.

Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times published an extraordinary essay headlined, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” In it, an unnamed “senior official” claimed to be “working diligently from within,” in concert with “many” colleagues, “to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.” The author went on to describe chaos, dysfunction and a president who changes his mind “from one minute to the next.”

Even more alarming, however, was the response from retiring Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, one of the few Republican officials who ever dare to criticize Trump, even mildly: “This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one.”

Trump’s enablers in Congress have all been lying to us. They pretend there is a normal president in the White House instead of, let’s be honest, a maniac. They know the risk the nation is running. They have the power to alleviate that risk but they do nothing, instead counting on “mature adults” in the administration to keep Trump from plunging the nation off some cliff.

According to Woodward’s book “Fear,” Trump was going to pull the United States out of a trade agreement with South Korea, but former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who saw the move as unthinkable, simply swiped the order from Trump’s desk before he could sign it. At another point, the book reports, Trump phoned Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and commanded him to assassinate Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. According to Woodward, Mattis played along, hung up the phone, and told an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that.”

It feels as if we have entered a new phase of the Trump saga. As with all the prior phases, it’s impossible to predict with confidence what will happen. But the combination of the Woodward book and the insider’s op-ed feels like an inflection point.

We learned about the insanity inside the West Wing months ago from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” but he got enough little things wrong to cast doubt on the big things he reported. We read it all again in Omarosa’s “Unhinged,” but she was a professional minor celebrity who’d had only glowing things to say about Trump until she got fired. Woodward, to say the least, is different.

Beginning with Watergate and Deep Throat, Woodward has set the gold standard for Washington-based investigative reporting. He doesn’t just get the goods; he keeps meticulous records, including recordings of many of his interviews. You will note that the denials coming from the Trump administration are actually carefully worded non-denials that skirt, rather than confront, the specifics of what Woodward wrote.

His account supports what we’ve been told all along by award-winning White House correspondents from The Washington Post, the Times and other media organizations.

As for the anonymous “senior official” who penned the op-ed in the Times, I’m not inclined to join the chorus of commentators who say he or she is being cowardly and instead should have gone public, resigned in front of television cameras, marched up to Congress and demanded to testify and ... and then what? Exactly what would such a performance achieve?

Does anyone believe the Republican leadership in the House and Senate would actually do anything? As Corker said, Trump’s unfitness has been obvious from the beginning. Republican officials have made the conscious decision to see, hear and speak no evil. We’re probably better off with the “senior official” still in place, saving us from Trump’s destructive whims.

The whistleblower wrote that “there were early whispers within the Cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment” by which Trump could be removed, but “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.”

After this week, however, it’s clear that we’re already in a constitutional crisis of frightening proportions. The Cabinet will not act. Congress, under GOP control, will not act. The internal “resistance” can only do so much.

Voters are the last line of defense. You must save the day. "