It's hard to be cynical tonight. Or at least I thought so until I turned on Fox News and caught a few minutes of Karl Rove. He spouted more statistics in five minutes than I usually read in a whole baseball season, trying to prove that what he believes is better than the actual facts. It's sort of like how those people view science in general. Thank goodness they didn't win (except in the House, of course).

Even beyond the win for President Obama, this was a good night. Gay marriage referendums passed in three states. Two candidates who spouted the belief that pregnancy resulting from rape was some kind of gift from God? Both lost. And Wisconsin has sent us our first openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin. On, Wisconsin! Marijuana was legalized in, uh, somewhere... I forget... What was I talking about again?

It's not really my place, but I want to thank Vermont for Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts for Elizabeth Warren. Thanks to Iowa and Colorado for putting the president over the top while we waited for Ohio and Florida. (Still waiting for Florida, as I write this. Luckily we don't have to depend on them this time, but I don't want to be snarky, because I think they will end up in the blue corner.)

And I'd honestly like to thank Mitt Romney for the gracious concession speech, but I remember how conciliatory George W. Bush was after he was appointed president, and how badly he betrayed that message in the months afterward. It would be nice to think the Republicans would work with Obama and the Democrats to solve the nation's problems. Nice, but naive.

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It would also be naive to think that anything that happened tonight means that an easy road lies ahead, for the winners or the losers. The election nudges us in the direction I, for one, wanted us to go, but it's just a nudge. There's a long way to go and it's going to take a lot of hard work to make it count. The greatest comfort from tonight is that the right wingers will not have a chance to name the next two or three Supreme Court justices. If you want the number one reason I voted for Obama, that's it.