After the most expensive presidential campaign in our history, Barack Obama has survived and been reelected. Credit the power of incumbency, the strong support from the major media outlets and the $100 million dollars worth of negative campaigning.

The problems this country faces in regards to the economy, taxes, runaway government spending, massive youth unemployment and under employment, and growing threats to our nation from a nuclear armed Iran and a resurgent Al-Qaeda require immediate cooperative efforts to deal with them successfully.

It is hoped President Obama this time, will be the President he promised last time, which was "to unify the nation and to put aside petty partisan differences."

We don't have the luxury of putting these problems off for another four years.

So we need a timeout in national politics - the 2016 and 2018 campaigns can wait awhile - and the President and the divided Congress need to focus on doing their jobs and not running for their jobs, because this country doesn't have the time to be diverted from the critical tasks ahead.

Our country's future depends on it and so, by the way, does our children's future.

It was a tough night. In Texas, the GOP on balance had a good night, but we lost some key races: Quico Canseco in Congressional District 23, Dr. Mark Shelton in State Senate District 10 and some State House races.

Looking across the country, what sticks out to us is the loss of US Senate seats we should have won in Indiana and Missouri, where Romney won handily, but our candidates were just too stupid to win. We must do a better job of nominating smart, qualified candidates or we will continue to lose races we shouldn't.

The race for the White House was close, but we came up short. Our thoughts today on why -- Hurricane Sandy, forgetting ObamaCare as an issue, not taking on the President regarding the Benghazi massacre, and Obama's campaign accusing Republicans of a war on women worked, as we lost the women's vote by 10%!

At the end of the day the nation is closely divided and there are more of them than us. But also remember with a shift of 355,000 votes in key states, we would have won, and Obama is down almost 10 million votes from 2008.

Harris County Republicans had a disappointing election. A reprise of 2008 with a straight ticket pull of almost 70% as TCR projected. The margin for error is low with such a strong straight ticket vote, and the Democrats won the straight vote by about 2,700 votes.

Romney lost the county by 600 votes. So what happened to the rest of our ticket? Ted Cruz won the county by around 18,000 votes totaling 581,197, but there was a drop off from there for the GOP in contested races with Democrats.

Further down the ballot, thank goodness Mike Anderson won a closer than it should have been race for District Attorney (given the choice he deserved 99% of the vote), but we lost the County Attorney and Sheriff races.

Sarah Davis won an expensive race for State Representative in a moderately conservative District 134. We lost a close race for Ken Legler's Representative seat with Daniel Pineda falling 1,600 votes short.

The judiciary GOP team suffered a tough night, losing most of the races by anywhere from a few thousand to over 30,000. There are a handful of judicial survivors, mostly our women: Elizabeth Ray, Debra Ibarra Mayfield, Theresa Chang, Reneé Magee, Kristin Guiney, Stacey Bond; and some men: Ryan Patrick, Tad Halbach, Ken Wise, Brock Thomas and Mark Kent Ellis. So we did better than in 2008, but we did not perform at the level we should have, given the quality of candidates and the money available.

Clearly, going forward we have our work cut out for us. We must do a better job of adding to our coalition and bringing out our voters.

2014 now shapes up as a critical election where a strong top of the ticket, a reconstructed victory program, better and more diverse candidate recruitment and the ending of a tendency among some of our elected officials to engage in the circular firing squad as occurred this year in the general election because of some alleged dissatisfaction with our nominees.

If we don't get our act together, we are on the road to being what we are in big city races, a significant part of a winning coalition, but we can't get to victory without other groups assisting.

Red, White & Blue featuring TCR Editor Gary Polland, liberal commentator David Jones and moderator Linda Lorelle on Fridays at 7:30 pm on PBS Houston Channel 8.1, replaying Sundays at 12:30 p.m. on Channel 8.1, Mondays at 11:30 pm on Channel 8.2 and on the web at www.houstonpbs.org.

For a fun feature go to www.houstonpbs.org and under Red White and Blue, you can see commentary about the show and its guests by Gary and David each week. The current show as well as past shows are also available on YouTube.

Gary Polland is a long-time conservative and Republican spokesman, fund-raiser, and leader who completed three terms as the Harris County Republican Chairman. During his three terms, Gary was described as the most successful county Chairman in America by Human Events - The National Conservative Weekly. He is in his fourteenth year of editing a newsletter dealing with key conservative and Republican issues. The last eleven years he has edited Texas Conservative Review. As a public service for the last 8 years, Gary has published election guides for the GOP primary, general elections and city elections, all with the purpose of assisting conservative candidates. Gary is also in his tenth year of co-hosting Red, White and Blue on PBS Houston. Gary is a practicing attorney and strategic consultant. He can be reached at (713) 621-6335.