This weekend, the New York Times and Washington Post offered almost identical assessments of the 2010 Congressional elections. While the Times announced "GOP poised to seize House, if not Senate," the Post predicted 'historic" losses with "more than 90 Democratic House seats are potentially in play."
But lost in the conventional wisdom that Barack Obama is about to relive Bill Clinton's 1994 midterm debacle is grimmer news still for Democrats and American democracy. Next week's vote hauntingly resembles the 1966 backlash election which almost literally whited out Lyndon Johnson's Great Society majority. And making it all worse is a media-driven perfect storm amplifying the right-wing Tea Party frenzy, unprecedented quantities of secret campaign cash and President Obama's own self-inflicted wounds.

It's the Economy. In this telling, 2010 will be 1994 (or 1982) all over again because, as the Clinton team used to say, "It's the economy, stupid." In August, Ezra Klein summed it up in the Washington Post, "There is a terrible and ongoing economic slump -- weekly jobless claims hit 500,000 today -- that is causing Americans immense pain and suffering," adding, "Any explanations for the current political mood that don't put those front and center is, at the least, not doing enough to challenge the counterfactual."
But over a year ago, the New Republic's John Judis posited that Obama's midterm fate, like Reagan and Clinton's before him, was tied to the unemployment rate. As Judis asked and answered in September 2009:

Are these signs of voter discontent the result of tactical errors by Obama? Would the numbers look different if he had given his impassioned defense of national health care in February, or if he and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had been tougher on the banks earlier this year? Perhaps these tactics would have led to a temporary bounce in Obama's popularity, but they would not have changed its overall trajectory. That's because Obama's fortunes are being driven mainly by one thing: not health care, but the economy.

In Judis' theory, the unemployment rate is destiny. Noting that Ronald Reagan's disapproval ratings closely tracked the unemployment rate, in November 1982, even a crippled Democratic Party was able to win 26 House seats as joblessness jumped to 10.8% from 7.2% 18 months earlier. And while Democrats lost a staggering 52 seats in 1994 as the economy slowly recovered from Bush the Elder's recession, Clinton "benefited dramatically in his second term from the public's perception of economic improvement."

But as Klein, Kevin Drum and others have noted, Barack Obama's Gallup approval ratings (now 45%) have not only followed the general trajectory for first term presidents, but actually exceed those of Reagan (42%) and Clinton (41%) at the same point in their recession-battered tenures:

To be sure, today's economic downturn is far more severe than that faced by Bill Clinton on the eve of his 1994 midterm catastrophe. But given the size of the GOP tsunami predicted by many next week, some other dynamic must be at work.
It's the Backlash. In the summer of 2009, political statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver explained, "The party that wins the White House almost always loses seats at the midterm elections -- since World War II, an average of 17 seats in the House after the White House changes parties." A year later, Ezra Klein echoed that finding:

"The pattern here is obvious: Losses, and big ones. Except for FDR's first midterm and George W. Bush's post-9/11 victory, there've been no gains at all."

As Klein concluded, "There are enormously powerful structural forces in American politics that seem to drag down first-term presidents." And especially since the advent of the GOP's Southern Strategy, one of them is the backlash vote.

Just two years after Barack Obama captured the White House with 365 electoral votes and an 8.5 million vote plurality, many of his Democratic allies who rode the same anti-Bush wave to power in Congress are in serious danger of being sent packing. But while that may sound like Bill Clinton's 1994 disaster, 2010 may be shaping up more like 1966.
That is just one of the many parallels which emerge from Rick Perlstein instant classic, Nixonland. Among other examinations of the politics of Richard Nixon, Perlstein recounts in detail how the Democratic landslide of 1964 within eight short years was eviscerated by the Nixon tidal wave of 1972. And the first step was the Republicans' overwhelming triumph in the 1966 midterms, an electoral watershed that washed 47 Democrats out of Congress.
Central to the turnaround was Richard Nixon. Six years after his razor-thin loss to John F. Kennedy, four years after his humiliating defeat in the California governor's race and two years after Lyndon Johnson won 61.1% of the vote, 44 states and 486 electoral votes, Nixon started his path to political resurrection in the run-up to the 1966 midterms. Capitalizing on the growing unease over the war in Vietnam and the building backlash against race riots and the welfare state, Nixon launched an aggressive, nationwide campaign of fundraising and campaign visits. His target: the new liberal Democratic freshmen who rode Johnson's coattails to take historically conservative seats.
Foreshadowing the culture warriors, gay bashers and Tea Baggers who now dominate Republican politics and right-wing radio, Nixon spoke to his audiences in code about Watts rioters and welfare recipients on the dole. It's easy to imagine that it was not Richard Nixon but instead Sarah Palin warning about Obama's "death panels" or FEMA concentration camps run by what Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deemed a "racist", an "angry black man" who "hates white people":

He was campaigning in traditionally Republican districts where a Democratic congressman had won in 1964 on Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but was likely to be swept out in the conservative backlash.
For instance, Iowa's first district. A five-term Republican, Fred Schwengel, was running to recover the seat he'd lost to a young political science professor from the Bronx named John Schmidhauser. One day, Representative Schmidhauser appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats' agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago's Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, "on motorcycles." The liberal political science professor was as vulnerable as a sapling...Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration seemed inevitable.

The Republican sweep which ensued in 1966 yielded immediate dividends for Nixon. As the 1968 presidential election neared, GOP Congressmen across the country were indebted to Nixon. Just as important, as Perlstein documented, Nixon was able to successfully portray the Republican victory as the result of the basest racial politics, but instead a rejection of President Johnson:

The misinterpretation that this was not a backlash election suited Richard Nixon just fine. He had studied the districts that Democrats had picked up in the sweep of 1964 and found them, still, essentially Republican. There were forty-seven of them. And although the districts did not match up exactly, forty-seven was the number of seats the Republicans picked up in 1966, in an election which the press now retroactively framed, not as it actually was, a referendum on the Negro revolution, but as what Nixon said it was: a referendum on Lyndon's Vietnam leadership, with Nixon's vision as the alternative. Warren Weaver of the New York Times obliged Nixon's interpretation by writing the next week that of the sixty-six House candidates Nixon had campaigned for, forty-four had won. The victory rate of the 319 Republicans who weren't afforded a Nixon visit was 44.8 percent. RFK's record was only 39 out of 76..."The political equivalent of the batting championship for the 1966 campaign season went to former Vice President Richard Nixon."
Better yet, the article added, "national political leaders do not like to waste their time campaigning for heavy favorites; if they did, their average would be much higher."
Nixon had bamboozled the Times. Wasting his time on candidates he thought most likely to win was exactly what he had been doing.

Which brings us to the emerging dynamics for the 2010 midterm elections. In 2006, Democrats gained 30 seats in the House and added another 21 two years later. As DailyKos documented, 38 Democrats from districts won by John McCain in 2008 voted "yes" on the health care reform bill. And it is those freshmen and sophomores currently warming traditionally Republican seats that are most vulnerable next week.
It's the Perfect Storm. At the forefront of the backlash vote is the Tea Party movement. Already on display during the fall of the 2008 campaign, these very white, extremely conservative and overwhelmingly Republican voters doubtless would have been part of Nixon's not so "silent majority" in 1966.
But their racial slurs, hate-filled signs and violent rhetoric are only part of the Tea Party's outsized impact on the fortunes of the Democratic Party and the nation. As President Obama summed it up, "facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day." And that reign of error, that triumph of know-nothingness is the defining achievement of the furious Tea Party movement, its clandestine funders and its willing media accomplices.
As the Washington Post reported this weekend:

A new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

Nevertheless, coverage of the Tea Party and its demonstrably false claims dominate the U.S. media.
Never has a modern political movement been so utterly wrong on simple matters of fact. After all, majorities of the Tea Party faithful doubt Barack Obama was born in the United States and up to a third wrongly believe he's a secret Muslim. The Tea Baggers' refrain of "keep your government hands off my Medicare" only makes sense if you believe, as 59% of self-identified conservatives and 62% of McCain voters do, that the program that provides health care for 46 million American seniors is not in fact run by the federal government. It's no wonder three in 10 of the elderly still believe what PolitiFact deemed the 2009 Lie of the Year, government "death panels."
Then there are the Tea Party's cognitive problems when it comes to basic math. In the telling of the Tea Party faithful and their media echo chamber, the 70,000 marchers at their 2009 "9/12" event in Washington became an army of 2,000,000. As political statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver diagnosed this case of wishful thinking in a piece aptly titled "Size Matters; So Do Lies":

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

But the Tea Party's war on numbers isn't merely self-delusional; it threatens financial ruin for the country. Conveniently ignoring that Ronald Reagan doubled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it again, the Tea Party Contract from America demands both that the Bush tax cuts be made permanent and a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. These posing deficit hawks like Rand Paul ("I'm not seeing it as a cost to government") play dumb about the Bush tax cut windfall for the wealthy accounting for half the debt added during Dubya's tenure and, if made permanent, contributing more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession combined. And while they are only too happy to back another $700 billion, 10-year payday for the richest 2% of Americans, the same frothing at the mouth Tea Partiers furious about "no taxation without representation" don't know that President Obama cut their taxes. As CBS noted:

Of people who support the grassroots, "Tea Party" movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

As former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett lamented, "For an antitax group, they don't know much about taxes."
The delusional if compelling theater of the Tea Party was the necessary but not sufficient condition of the Democrats' woes this November. That tidal wave of recession and a not-so-subtle racial subtext also required unprecedented Republican obstructionism and the unlimited corporate cash to finance it, courtesy of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. But even that was not enough for Barack Obama, as David Corn put it, "to lose to the legion of doom."
That required Obama himself.
Bill Clinton, too, faced unified Republican opposition that voted in lockstep against his first-term domestic agenda. But as the health care imbroglio and the stimulus revealed, it was President Obama's trademark risk aversion and quixotic search for consensus which boomeranged politically. On these and other issues, Obama's watered-down policies only served to embolden his enemies while alienating his friends.
From the beginning, Paul Krugman was prescient about the political path the recovery from the Bush recession would take. On January 5th, 2009, Krugman warned then President-elect Obama about the stimulus plan, "Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they'll demand 100%." The next day on January 6th, Krugman warned that the $787 billion recovery package was not only too small, but would pose dire political consequences for President Obama:

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we're talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says "See, government spending doesn't work."

In October, Krugman updated his grim assessment. "I went back to my first blog post -- January 6, 2009 -- worrying that the Obama economic plan was too cautious...Alas, I didn't have it wrong -- except that unemployment will, if we're lucky, peak around 10 percent, not 9." A second stimulus would almost surely be required, an economic necessity that politically would be almost impossible to produce. As Ezra Klein recently described the self-fulfilling prophecy that unfolded for President Obama:

Ten percent unemployment and a terrible recession ended up discrediting the people trying to do more for the economy, as their previous intervention was deemed a failure. That, in turn, empowered the people attempting to do less for the economy. So rather than a modestly sized stimulus leaving the door open for more stimulus if needed, its modest size was used to discredit the idea of more stimulus when it became needed.

Alas, it wasn't just the stimulus, a success according to CBO and the overwhelming consensus of economists, which was discredited. It was President Obama and the Democratic agenda itself.
All of which means 2010 isn't merely a rerun of 1994 or 1966. As Nate Silver, the Cook Political Report and others forecast, it could be even worse for Democrats.