AMANDA FOREMAN When is a defeat actually a victory? When it destroys the enemys future capacity to fight. Obama can take comfort from this maxim, as he contemplates the new reality on Capitol Hill today. The polls predicted a massive swing to the Republicans and were proven right: 10 governorships, six Senate seats and more than 60 House seats. There has not been such a seismic change in the House for the past 70 years. But it is important to put Obamas defeat in perspective: Bush lost the House, the Senate, and the majority of state governorships in the 2006 mid-terms, and Clinton suffered a similar drubbing in 1994. Bush was already on the way out, but Clinton went on to win a second term in 1996 - the first Democratic President to do so since Franklin Roosevelt. So all is not lost for Obama simply because the US electorate has signalled its disapproval. Clinton allegedly declared the morning after the mid-terms: This can be liberating. A natural conciliator and communicator, Clinton was able to move to the centre and re-fashion his message to suit the mood of the nation. Famously, he declared: The era of big government is over, touching on an American preoccupation that has its roots in the Civil War and beyond. Obama, of course, cannot and would not ever make the same pronouncement because he believes in big government. His entire administrative agenda during the past two years has been about increasing government control. It is not just the arena of health care that has been the recipient of a whole raft of new regulations and restrictions. There are new regulations for the insurance industry, the mining and drilling industry, the accounting sector, the financial sector, the fishing sector, even the quarantine and animal control sector. The micro-managing hand of Washington is everywhere. The self-employed, for example, must now file a tax form for every purchase worth $600 or more. This is the kind of federal intrusion into ordinary life that makes Americans reach for their cheque books in the worst way - to fund opposition candidates. Polls revealed that the overwhelming majority of the electorate fears that ideology is the primary force behind Obama, rather than the needs of the country. According to CNN, 86 percent said that they were still worried about the economy, and four in 10 claimed that they had become worse off financially since Obama came to power. With all this, apparently, in the Republicans favour it may seem perverse to describe the mid-terms, as a win for the Democrats. But the truth is, Obama does not need to imitate Clinton to trounce his opponents in 2012. Obama knows that his situation is far closer to Lincolns than to Clintons. There is no such thing as a direct historical parallel, but from the outset Obama has done his utmost to link his presidency with Lincolns. Both were Washington outsiders with minuscule political experience at the time of their election. Both were reluctant war Presidents, who had to lead a divided country that disagreed on the aims and the reasons for the war. Finally, both stuck to a controversial, even unpopular, message that threatened to derail their administration and turn them into one-term Presidents. What saved Lincoln with the electorate were not military victories, but the divisions of his Democrat opponents. The Democratic Party then was split broadly between those who supported the war against the South but not because of slavery, and those who wanted peace on any condition. It was then further divided over economic issues, states rights, tariffs, and immigration. Although the Democrats achieved significant gains in the 1862 mid-terms - they only served to highlight and exacerbate these contradictions, further weakening the Party in the run-up to the presidential election. The Tea Party is going to relay the same favour to the Obama administration. The President does not have to change his rhetoric or his position. He can stay firm and let his opponents do the work for him. The third party movement led by Ross Perot against Clinton was nothing compared to the following garnered by the Tea Partiers. Yet, Perots movement, called the Reform Party, destroyed the Republicans hopes of taking the White House in 1992. Indeed, the only pledge of Perots that voters could actually remember was his promise to reduce the federal budget deficit - hardly a cause to bring people out into the streets. Two years from now, the Republican Party will look back on the midterm election results as the beginning of the end. It will be fighting the greatest internal threat since the split of the Democratic Party in the 1860 election 150 years-ago this week. Obama, on the other hand, will look strong for having stuck to an unpopular message, rather than stiff-necked and arrogant. And, if the economy turns around, he will be revered as the greatest visionary since Franklin Roosevelt. The Independent