As some of you may have noticed, there was an election last week. I don't have any earth-shattering insights to add a week after the fact. I recommend, among others, William Saletan's coverage. I also generally agreed with this Charles Krauthammer piece about the impact of 9/11 on the election:

The Sept. 11 effect was far more subtle and far more profound. It returned America to a world of danger, a world we thought we had escaped, perhaps for good, with the end of the cold war. For two generations after the late 1930s, Americans faced one great existential threat after another — world war, cold war, the threat of nuclear war. During the age of anxiety, anyone aspiring to serious national office had to pass the elementary test: seriousness on national security.
...This election was the first 9/11 election. The Democrats lost it badly. And they will continue to lose elections until they can pass that old cold war threshold test: trust on fundamental national security. Yes, Democrats need a message. Yes, they need coherence. But if they conclude from this election that they need to move left on foreign policy — becoming coherently softer on national security — they are ensuring themselves even greater defeats.
We are at war. It doesn't feel like it in our everyday life, but it didn't always feel that way day to day during the cold war either. Nonetheless, during the cold war we knew at the deepest level that there were implacable enemies out there arming and organizing against us. Sept. 11 brought back that feeling, however unacknowledged, however subconscious. Until this war, like the cold war, is won, all elections will be 9/11 elections — elections that those who ignore this unhappy truth will continue to lose.

Finally, even though the elections are over, let's hope that ABC's The Note returns soon. Some tidbits from its final post-election edition, regarding things they'd like to analyze further:

How the Republican National Committee opposition research team has no room to store all of the Nexis material on Pelosi and Frost they already have dug up.
... The ongoing mismatch that exists between the two parties in terms of day-to-day combat because the Republicans have all their best players on the field, while the the most experienced generation of Democratic operatives (from the Clinton-Gore years) continue to mostly get involved only when they feel like it — and sometimes that hinders more than helps.
...How silly the Chattering Class is to muse about how the Bush Administration might now make the mistakes of 41 and/or the Gingrich Revolution. For despite the great affection that the president and Karl Rove have for both 41 and Newt Gingrich, and despite (or maybe, because of) how often they talk to both of them, there is nothing they have more clearly exhibited than the ability to learn from past GOP mistakes, and to use that knowledge to keep aggregating power for a conservative agenda, using centrist and inclusive rhetoric (and some policies) to stay in the mainstream.