What happens when you’ve worked really hard on your campaign, talked to many people including many who disagree with you, then spent the next two years trying to raise money while hearing from people who support the opposing party anyway that the President is doing a horrible job?

Well you vote against what the President supports, right?

Unfortunately right in several instances. The democrats in the senate from historically conservative districts are doing exactly what the conservative democrats did in Clintons mid-term election. They’re running for their lives from all that is perceived as liberal. But like the democratic congressmen and congresswomen running for office in Clinton’s mid-term, they will lose their seats.

They will lose their seat not because their own districts did not believe in the same things they believe in. They will lose their seats because they lacked the backbone to accomplish anything that separates them from the republicans. They chose to listen, not to the many people who supported them, but rather to the people who opposed them in the past and to those who will oppose them next November. They should lose. They deserve to lose. After all, if democrats can’t even rally around an issue as fundamentally democratic as healthcare as a right as opposed to healthcare only for the rich, and we’re clearly moving in that direction, cowardly democrats deserve to lose.

But is this, or should it be all doom and gloom for democrats? Of course not. Remember, this is a new crew of democrats than in Clinton’s mid-term. They don’t have the experience of seeing their red-state democratic friends box up their belongings to clear out their offices for the next wave of rabid republicans.

And yes, they do deserve to lose.

This may be the year that congressional democrats are given their virtual pink slips, but the remaining democrats will see who wins their seats and who loses. Those who fought the tough fight and held firm on a public option will go home and campaign this fall. Some of them will win and return to the Senate and the House. The Senators who opposed the pubic option but did not fall as they were not up for re-election will see this and maybe some of them will find a little courage knowing that when a democrat stands for a democratic ideal, they are rewarded by the electorate, but a democrat who stands for nothing will almost always be punished. (I can’t help but be reminded of the first Batman movie where Jack Nicholson’s Joker character proclaimed, “this town needs an enema”.)

To top it off, democrats still hold the White House and President Obama is every bit as shrewd as his predecessor. There is little doubt that he will take every opportunity to bash a new Republican house which opposes is every move. There is little doubt that he will place the blame for failures exactly where it belongs — on the obstructionists.

And that, is the short version of why Obama will be rewarded by the electorate with a second term.