Paul Krugman discusses what he calls "the pundit delusion," in which pundits believe the day-to-day inside baseball (the stuff they love to endlessly recycle) is what determines the fate of the administration, when it really comes down to how well people are doing economically:

What should Mr. Obama have done? Some political analysts, like Charlie Cook, say that he made a mistake by pursuing health reform, that he should have focused on the economy. As far as I can tell, however, these analysts aren’t talking about pursuing different policies — they’re saying that he should have talked more about the subject. But what matters is actual economic results.

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Mr. Obama do anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is all. Mr. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap” by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote. But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect, instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal — when his real mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

Campaign analyst Charlie Cook says so far, it's still unlikely that we'll see a Republican sweep in 2010:

To put it another way, as things stand now, Republicans could win every competitive House race and still come up one seat short. That won't be the case, however, if there is further erosion in the ranks of the solid and likely Democratic seats. Although Democrats can take some solace from the fact that no party has ever lost every single competitive House race, none of the four lawmakers who have recently added their names to the retirement list -- Brian Baird of Washington, Bart Gordon of Tennessee, Dennis Moore of Kansas, and John Tanner of Tennessee -- was considered particularly vulnerable a year ago.

For Republicans to take control of the House, more Democrats in swing districts would have to retire. There will be more, but how many?

If 10 or 12 more seats rated as solid or likely Democratic shift to the "lean Democratic" or "toss-up" columns, the fight for control will become much more serious. Washington is awash in rumors of other veteran Democrats contemplating voluntary exits. Some serve in safely Democratic districts, but others represent places not unlike the districts of Baird, Gordon, Moore, and Tanner. Also helping the GOP is its best House recruiting in a long time. A crop of strong candidates will help Republicans win more than their share of contests if the political environment remains what it is today.

Winds that began shifting against Democrats around the end of June, during the House cap-and-trade vote and the beginning of the health care debate, are now transforming their party's potential problems into real ones. That change is causing predictable talk of a 1994-style Republican landslide strong enough to flip the Senate. That talk, though, is just so much hot air.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Senate's 2010 lineup of contests couldn't take such talk seriously. For Republicans to seize the Senate, they would have to hold all six of their open seats, which is quite plausible. All 12 of the GOP incumbents up for re-election would also have to win, which is quite likely. The Republicans would then have to pick up the Delaware and Illinois open seats that Democrats now hold -- a feat that is not difficult to imagine.

However -- and this is where the going would get rough for the Republicans -- they would need to defeat Michael Bennet in Colorado, Barbara Boxer in California, Christopher Dodd in Connecticut, Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, Harry Reid in Nevada, and Arlen Specter (or Joe Sestak if he wins the primary) in Pennsylvania, plus Republican Gov. John Hoeven of North Dakota would have to run and beat Byron Dorgan.

No party in history has ever run the table that completely. And even then, the GOP would come up one seat short.

The fragility of the Democrats' Senate majority is visible, though, if you look toward 2012, when 23 Democratic seats will be on the line compared with just nine Republican ones, and ahead to 2014, when 20 Democratic seats but only 13 Republican ones will be up for grabs.

Just as much has changed in the past year, much could change in the next. What the past tells us is that it takes a truly major event -- such as the 9/11 attacks of 2001 or the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton -- to improve the fortunes of the president's party going into a midterm election. Only one thing seems certain: 2010 won't be dull.