The debate ended, the votes were cast, and all eyes turned toward the board in the Senate chamber that shows the tally by flashing a green or red light next to each name.

It was not close. With Democrats in firm control of every lever of power in Trenton, they could not deliver, not by a long shot.

This was a fitting finale to the Democratic decade in Trenton, one last taste of the incompetence that has left the state in such a mess.

At the end, Democrats stumbled away like a defeated army. The board showing the vote tally, which sometimes stays on for hours, was snapped off quickly, as if they were ashamed of it.

“This should have been a slam dunk,” said Sen. Ray Lesniak, one of the party’s frustrated power brokers.

The victims this time were the thousands of gay couples across this state, and their children, who just got a slap in the face. The message opponents delivered to them was an ugly one, whether it was inspired by religion, by tradition or by old-fashioned bigotry. They are secondclass families who cannot join the club.

COMPLETE COVERAGE

HOW THEY VOTED

N.J. Senate votes down same-sex marriage bill, gay rights advocates vow to bring issue to court

Full coverage of the Senate debate

Videos from the Statehouse

Moments from the N.J. Statehouse during the gay marriage vote

Full Star-Ledger coverage of the Gay Marriage Debate in New Jersey

But most of us are victims of this Democratic decade in one way or another, unless you have one of those fat state pensions. Consider property taxes, job losses, the state’s enormous debt, and the everincreasing salaries and benefits that we pay to teachers, firefighters and cops. We face a mess that will take many years to clean up.

“The reason for that is we have not been bold enough,” Lesniak said. “The Democratic Party has lost its moral compass. We have been timid.”

Think about the crisp leadership Michael Bloomberg has given New York City, and then imagine the opposite. That’s us.

Democrats have stepped around the big problems for a decade, hoping to just make it through the next election. They’ve never picked a fight with the overfed teachers union, and did nothing when salaries went up another 4 percent even during this Great Recession. The police union is even more untouchable, which is why the average cop in a place like Edison makes more than $100,000 a year.

They were scared to raise taxes to pay for open space, and scared to say no to environmentalists. So we borrowed again, sinking deeper into the fiscal whirlpool. It goes on and on like this.

And it happened again with gay marriage. Gov. Jon Corzine decided long ago he didn’t want this fight during an election year. Too scary, even though the polls showed consistent public support.

Then he lost to Chris Christie, and the handful of GOP senators who were considering supporting it all slithered away, except for Sen. Bill Baroni. That made building a majority almost impossible.

It was downhill from there. Democrats started to peel off after the Catholic Church made its influence felt.

And if you want timidity, this is how bad it got yesterday: Sen. Steve Sweeney, who will soon take over as Senate president, didn’t even vote. As other senators reached for their voting buttons, he held his hands on his desk, staring ahead with a blank expression.

“That’s a real profile in courage,” one Democrat muttered.

The consolation is that gay marriage will come someday. Supporters will go back to court. And even if that doesn’t work, the sweep of history is clear. Someday soon this will look a lot like Woolworth’s refusal to serve hamburgers to black customers in the Old South.

Opponents lost every argument on the floor yesterday. Sen. Gerald Cardinale called for a referendum on gay marriage. Lesniak pointed out that New Jersey voters soundly rejected suffrage for women in 1914.

Several senators said civil unions provide the same legal rights as marriage. Sen. Nia Gill read from a national policy from Oxford Insurance that offered benefits to spouses in gay marriages, but not to those in civil unions.

Opponents talked endlessly about preserving the glorious tradition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Gill pointed out that until 1967, several states in America banned marriage between a man and woman who were not of the same race. Should we have stuck with that tradition?

The balcony in the Senate chamber had a good number of gay marriage opponents, most of them in matching red T-shirts. They clapped at the talk of tradition, and clapped again when Cardinale compared gay marriage with polygamy.

And they clapped one final time when they looked at the board and saw the red lights dominate.

That was it. The Democrats filed out, one by one. Their time was over. And they had blown it one last time.