See, I Told You So

Tuesday's victory was bigger than you think.

by Rod D. Martin
November 5, 2004

There is simply no calculating the victory that was Tuesday. But that victory was not so much in the results.

No, it was not that George W. Bush beat John Kerry, beat the media, beat the French, and generally whipped every tail in sight to become the first president elected by a majority since 1988 and the highest vote-getter of all time. That was good. But that wasn't it.

It wasn't the tectonic shift in the Senate either, as astonishing as that was. Oh, everyone knew a four-seat shift to the Republicans was possible, but no one dared predict it. Certainly no one dared predict a newly conservative composition of the enlarged Republican majority so great as to render hard-left “Republicans” like Arlen Specter in trouble and Lincoln Chafee irrelevant.

But the Senate earthquake isn't the biggest victory either.

Nor was it the eleven out of eleven states which overwhelmingly amended their constitutions to officially define marriage as being between one man and …