Bob Novak, the conservative columnist, summed up his opinion of last night's Obama victory by minimizing it in a short Chicago Sun-Times editorial. He writes of Obama, ...he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.

While it might be true that the Democratic gains resulted in neither filibuster nor veto-proof majorities, one can argue that Obama did, in fact, receive a mandate from the people.

It is, of course, all debatable, and the only reason I write about it at all is to point out the hypocrisy of the political partisans like Bob Novak.

Compare Mr. Novak's trivialization of Democrat Barack Obama's victory to his defense of Republican George W. Bush's reelection in 2004:

SHIELDS: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?

BOB NOVAK, CAPITAL GANG: Of course it is. It's a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn't a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. (CNN, November 6, 2004)

Novak claims that Bush's margin of victory, 3.5 million votes, equals a mandate, but Obama's margin of 7.5 million votes does not; that the 2004 Republican gains of Zero in the House of Representatives and Zero in the Senate equal a mandate, yet the 2008 Democratic gains of Twenty-Three in the House and Six in the Senate do not; that Bush's margin of victory of 34 Electoral votes is a mandate, yet Obama's margin of 190 is not.

Given the numbers, it doesn't take a genius to see that Novak's opinion adds up to blatant hypocrisy.