Get ready for the Democrats’ fear factor in the fall elections: the Republican Party (scary) has been co-opted by the Tea Party (even scarier) and you’ll be so frightened out of your wits that you’ll vote Democratic.

Not going to happen. No matter how much Vice President Joe Biden calls it the “Bush recession,” or Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine pushes the message, as Marc Ambinder neatly captures it, “We may be incompetent, but they’re crazy,” the fact is that Democrats in the mid-term elections will have to run on the policy choices they made the past 18 months and the resulting wreckage in the economy.

Michael Barone writes that “generic ballot results and polls in individual districts… suggest that House Democrats are headed toward historic losses.”

If so, they can recall the Kool-Aid they drank when President Obama took office and led the country down a path it did not want to tread: more government bloat, massive deficit spending and a disdain for the people who pay the bills.