Writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Andrew Klavan identifies "three areas to which conservatives need to commit intellectual and financial resources—three areas that our intelligentsia and funders, in their impractical practicality, too often ignore." They are "The mainstream news media," "The entertainment industry," and "Religion for intellectuals."

How bad is it? What went wrong? And what comes next?

For a right-of-center person staggering out of bed this morning, it's a pretty grim picture. It was one thing for America to have elected Barack Obama president in 2008 when voters might have thought he was some kind of post-partisan figure. But this time around, with his record of polarizing failure there for all to see, is a kind of "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" moment. And four more years of Mr. Obama is just the beginning. Get ready for Senator Elizabeth Warren (she won). California voters approved Proposition 30, which raises sales taxes in the state and increases income taxes on Californians who earn more than $250,000 a year (The top state income tax rate in California will increase to 12.3% from 9.3%.)

New York City-based readers who get the news channel NY1 may be able to catch a glimpse of me tonight after 9:30 p.m.; I'll be in the TV studio as part of a panel of political commentators. As always, you never know with television whether you'll be bumped at the last minute, but that is the plan as it stands now.

James Taranto offers a conservative case for optimism in the event of an Obama victory: "If Obama is re-elected, he will inherit this mess from himself. There will be no blaming George W. Bush for a two-term Obama presidency. History will hold Obama accountable for the results, and the electorate will hold his party accountable in 2014 and 2016."

There were plenty of voters at my polling place this morning, even though it had been moved about a ten-minute walk away from its usual location because the usual location had been turned into a shelter for Hurricane Sandy victims, and even though New York is not a battleground swing state. From my arrival at the polling place to my departure the process, including line-waiting, took about 40 minutes.

Last night at about 7 p.m. our house got a robo-call from the Obama campaign seeking volunteers to help get out the vote in Philadelphia.

Six reasons Mitt Romney won the election are the topic of my column this week. (One might also add a seventh, which is that he wanted to spend more on the military than President Obama did. War may be unpopular, but military spending still has a lot of political support.) Please check out the column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), or Newsmax (here). And if it turns out Mr. Obama won, then explanations for that can be found in another column I did back in September about why Mr. Obama was winning.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein explains his vote: "Unfortunately, neither candidate is running as a libertarian on economic issues. But as the election draws near, the best cannot be the enemy of the good....Though no libertarian can take comfort in the blurry Romney campaign, the scorecard does tip in his balance. The state of play nationwide on social issues is decidedly mixed, with too much intolerance on both sides. But on economic issues, the one confident point is that in an age of bloated government, the correct vote goes to the party, when the campaigning is mercifully done, that is more likely to limit the rate of government growth, if not shrink the size of government altogether. This election cycle, that party is the GOP. "

Yale University marked the election with a panel discussion moderated by the president of Yale, Richard Levin, about the economy. The one hour, 57 minute YouTube video is here and embedded below. FutureOfCapitalism suffered through it so that you can skip it. It amounted to a four-on-one debate, in which the one participant who took a more free-market approach, Aleh Tsivinski, spoke for a few short moments, while the four participants from left field dominated the discussion. Highlights, or lowlights, depending on how one sees it:

Michael Woodford, the John Bates Clark professor of political economy at Columbia University, at about 31 minutes in, calls Republican proposals to explore a gold standard or audit the Federal Reserve "perverse," and speaks of what he calls "the advantages of allowing neutral technical expertise to be deployed rather than putting it all up for debate in Congress." (What other "complex" government issues than monetary policy, one wonders, would Professor Woodford prefer to remove from Congressional control and place instead in the hands of purportedly neutral technical experts?)

Bloomberg View has an editorial on income inequality that makes some sensible points, among them:

Most Americans, no matter how humble their circumstances, don't resent the wealthy so much as strive to get rich, too....Some imbalance is good. Imagine a tax system that would redistribute income so that everyone came out roughly equal. Entrepreneurs wouldn't be motivated to innovate because they wouldn't be able to reap the rewards. Fewer risks would be taken, and economic growth would stall. It would be convenient to blame the super-rich for stagnant middle-class incomes. It would also be wrong.

The editorial goes on, less sensibly in my view, to call for increasing the estate tax rate to 45% from 35% while decreasing the exemption to $3.5 million from $5.1 million.

"Instead of just waiving the Jones Act to get gas into NYC, as Obama admin just did, why not go all the way and repeal it?" — Ira Stoll, on Twitter, 11:34 a.m, November 2.

"Washington also waived the Jones Act requiring fuel tankers to pay a tax before unloading cargo between U.S. ports. The waiver is making it easier to ship more oil faster from the Gulf of Mexico to the Northeast, proving once again that the Jones Act should be repealed in toto." — Wall Street Journal editorial, November 4, 7:01 p.m.

If there's a conventional wisdom about how to respond to the financial crisis, it's that banks need higher capital requirements. President Obama, in his first presidential debate with Mitt Romney, said the Obama administration had said, "banks, you've got to raise your capital requirements." Mr. Romney agreed: "you need to have leverage limits." The free-market-oriented Wall Street Journal editorial page editorializes in favor of tougher capital requirements as a "critical reform," while the left-of-center New York Times editorial page mentions the Dodd-Frank Law imposing "higher capital requirements for banks" as a reason to vote for Mr. Obama.

University of Chicago professor John Cochrane writes on the choice:

The last four years of disastrous economic policy came from a deeply ingrained philosophy: that detailed discretionary control by government bureaucrats is the way to run the macro and micro economy. That growth comes from a one-year special tax break for this or that, a $7000 credit for silicon valley tycoons to buy electric sports cars, and sending the staff of HHS to tell each of us what medicine we need and the Fed to tell each bank who it should lend to.

No. Prosperity comes from property rights, rule of law, simple clear and stable taxation and regulation, which is hard to bend to crony capitalism and protection, and competition.

Not everything in Romney's plan is perfect. I won't defend "energy independence" and a fairly mercantilist attitude towards trade.

There was an interesting little dialogue on Twitter yesterday between me and Will Wilkinson, who blogs for the Economist. It went like this:

Wilkinson: What financial reforms could be reasonably expected to both improve allocation of capital & slow top 1% income growth?

Stoll: Why is "slow top 1% income growth" a goal? Why not speed up everyone else?

Wilkinson: There is a well-founded suspicion, which I share, that the financial sector has distributed upward without boosting growth.

Stoll: Plenty of top 1% not in financial sector. Oprah, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Brin, pro athletes, actors, cardiac surgeons, Bezos

The left says the Hurricane Sandy recovery effort shows the need for big government. But one can just as easily make the case that it shows the need for private enterprise. The Wall Street Journal has a news article about some of the companies that make or supply the pumps being used to remove water from New York City basements and tunnels. Sure enough, the pumps are privately made:

People tend to overlook the importance of pumps, except "when they're in trouble," says Jim Gorman, the 88-year-old chairman of Gorman-Rupp, which is based in Mansfield, Ohio....Mr. Gorman, the chairman of Gorman-Rupp, has been in the business since the late 1930s. His father, J.C. Gorman, and a partner, H.E. Rupp, started the company in 1933 in a barn on the outskirts of Mansfield, in north-central Ohio, with capital of $1,500.

Given all the attention devoted to educational technology that offers online lectures from remote locations, it's a wonder that it hasn't been used more widely while New York City's public schools have been closed for five days in response to Hurricane Sandy. The Web site GothamSchools.org, which is the go-to-site for comprehensive coverage of public education in New York City, reports:

Ralph Martinez, the principal of P.S. 89 in the Bronx, said his teachers had posted new homework assignments and practice materials online using the program Jupiter Grade. But he said not every student has internet access at home....

At Stuyvesant High School, which is located next to the West Side Highway and currently does not have power, longtime computer science teacher Mike Zamansky resumed classes for some of his students on Wednesday by online Google chat.