Washington ? They don’t know whether they’ll be in the majority or the minority this time next year. They don’t know who their leaders will be. They don’t know where their money is going to come from. They don’t know what issues to stress or how to push them.

Congressional Democrats, closer to power than they were at the end of the Clinton years, are nonetheless in a fix in the Bush years. In public, they boast they are within striking distance of strengthening their one-seat majority in the Senate and winning back the House after eight years in the wilderness. In private, they concede they are confused about how to take on President Bush, they worry they could lose as many as three seats and thus power in the Senate, and they fear they are watching their prospects of taking over the House diminish with the days.

It is ironic that this Democratic disquiet is emerging at the very time of the party’s greatest reform triumph, this week’s congressional approval of the campaign-finance bill. Indeed, this legislation could do more to put the Democrats at a disadvantage than any measure the party has supported since the civil-rights bills of the 1960s, which put the Democrats on the right side of history but gave the Republicans a new foothold in the South.

The party, moreover, had hoped that the recession would provide a political solution to the problem that Bush’s wartime popularity created. But if Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is right, the usual advantages Democrats have during a GOP recession won’t be present in November.

A party that retained its confidence on Capitol Hill even after it lost five out of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988 now finds itself unusually uneasy, even timid and tentative. The Democrats began to regain their footing in the early days of the Bush administration; their triple offensive on winning prescription-drug benefits, passing a patients’ bill of rights and protecting Social Security was gaining traction and support. But in those days the congressional Democrats were competing against congressional Republicans. Now the congressional Republicans are not a factor, and the Democrats are helpless in the face of President Bush’s popularity.

The Democrats’ problems are personified by and exacerbated by their leaders. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri are both struggling to maintain unity within their caucuses, both struggling to fashion a strategy to retain support for the president’s policies abroad while attacking his policies at home, both struggling with decisions about running for president themselves. The prospect that both could be gone from their posts in nine months only adds to the party’s sense of instability and insecurity on Capitol Hill.

Daschle’s Democratic caucus is so brittle that he can’t deviate from an approach that is so moderate that national party leaders privately complain Senate Democrats are to the right of Bill Clinton. Daschle worries every day that one of his 49 fellow Democrats might bolt.

In an atmosphere where a single lawmaker’s defection could make the difference in legislation, many senators fret that Sen. Zell Miller, the conservative from Georgia, is the most influential Democrat in the Senate. Daschle jokes that he spends much of his day checking on the moods of his colleagues, none more than Miller. Last year Miller voted with his fellow Democrats only 42 percent of the time. No other lawmaker of either party defected anywhere close to half the time.

The result is that the liberals in the party feel marginalized Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, for example, would prefer to deal directly with President Bush and the lawmakers in close races feel threatened whenever controversial topics reach the floor. Sens. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Jean Carnahan of Missouri, both facing tough challenges, aren’t eager for a vote on any proposal to cut taxes, which is exactly what the Republicans in the Senate hope will happen in September or October, at the height of election politics. They voted for the Bush tax cuts last year.

The situation is no less tense in the House, where Gephardt knows that even if the Democrats finally recapture the House, his majority would be so small that it would be very difficult to be an effective leader. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois knows this but it may be harder for a Democrat to be a speaker in this situation than for a Republican. There are more conservative Democrats than moderate Republicans, and conservative Democrats tend to be more independent than moderate Republicans.

That’s why those closest to Gephardt say that he seems more interested in running for president now than at any time since 1988. If he does, and if Daschle joins him, there may be even more instability inside the Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill.