What difference a hundred miles makes. Hurricane Sandy made its landfall on the New Jersey shore, wiping away whole beachside communities. Damage was massive in the New York Bight, on Staten Island, in Manhattan, the Rockaways, Long Beach, and Fire Island, lessening to the east and north, farther from the storm’s highest winds.

    Our sympathies first are for those who lost family or friends. Locally, we mourn Edith Wright, a Montauk woman whose body was found at Georgica Beach.

    As bad as the damage was along the East End’s waterfronts, and as difficult the loss of power was for many residents and businesses, it could have been far, far worse had Sandy taken only a slightly more northerly path. Everyone, from homeowners to public officials, must keep this fully in mind.

    There will be a time for rebuilding, reconsidering policy, and evaluating official preparations, but for now, it is all about getting through the next few days, neighbor helping neighbor, and just doing what it takes to get life back to normal.

   For the first time in a long while, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who has been a fixture on the political scene for a generation, has a challenger with a real shot.

    Southampton Councilwoman Bridget Fleming was a government neophyte when she emerged to win a Southampton Town Board seat in 2010. Her background is in law. She was a Manhattan assistant district attorney and has cited her record in prosecuting cases of fraud. As a member of the town board, she has worked on improving financial controls, an interest she said she would bring to Albany. As a resident of Noyac, she is attuned to the South Fork, pushing for more underground utility lines, supporting local agriculture, and aiding water-quality programs, among other efforts. She has a small law office in Sag Harbor, specializing in matrimonial and family matters.

    Like Ms. Fleming, Mr. LaValle is a lawyer, though with 36 years in the $79,000 Senate job, it would be accurate to call him a professional politician. Before he first won election to state office in 1976, he taught high school social studies. His involvement in education did not end when he went to the capital; he has been on the Senate Higher Education Committee for many years and active in efforts to consolidate school districts.

    Listening to Ms. Fleming, we have been struck by a certain uneven quality. On some of the nitty-gritty, she can stumble or say a lot without really saying anything. She is, however, fluent and strong on such issues as wasteful government spending, campaign finance, and Wall Street abuses. She also scores points by taking on the $140,000 Mr. LaValle used of taxpayer money to send out early election-year mailers, as well as the more than $500,000 he spent on his office.

    At this point in his career, Mr. LaValle is more than comfortable in the role, and this shows. His apparent ease can be a negative; one might say he is at best a casual Bonacker, who only shows up in East Hampton when there is a photo-op or when he is seeking re-election. That in and of itself is not a reason to support his opponent. What tips the balance against him is his 2011 vote against New York’s historic same-sex marriage bill and his strong backing by an anti-abortion group. Though his positions on these fundamental issues of human rights may come from deep personal conviction, the times have moved beyond him.

    The First Senatorial District is huge, extending from Brookhaven to Montauk Point and Fisher’s Island. Mr. LaValle’s opponent may not be a perfect candidate, but he is someone whose views are no longer in line with the people he represents. First District voters should thank him for the work he has done on their behalf over the decades, but go with Ms. Fleming, a better choice for these times.

   The Wilkinson administration in East Hampton Town Hall is proud of having set the town’s financial condition to rights on the heels of former Supervisor Bill McGintee’s irregular manipulation of funds, which left the town with a huge internal deficit. But there is a flaw in the proceedings of the town budget office that warrants attention.

    If Len Bernard, the budget office director, is good at one thing, it is fiddling with the books to leave the next, presumably opposing-party, town board majority with the prospect of a tax hike two or four years hence.

    History can be a guide: As the budget officer for Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, Mr. Bernard left several anticipated expenses unfunded, notably pensions and police contracts. This forced Supervisor McGintee to raise taxes in the first year he was responsible for the budget, and even more the following year.

    This time, the budget office calculation involves as much as a $5.7 million surplus, which was created by the town’s borrowing more than it turned out to need to repay the McGintee debt due to the depletion of various funds during the McGintee years. The question now is what to do with the extra money.

    Applying the surplus to operating expenses, or to purposes for which it was not borrowed to begin with, would provide taxpayers with a “reward” of lower rates now at the expense of higher rates in the future. This is a serious risk and a matter that deserves scrutiny by the state comptroller, whose office is overseeing East Hampton Town’s books as a condition of the deficit-financing deal, as well as public discussion.

    There is a big question of how the deficit-financing money can be used and the appropriateness of applying it to anything other than its state-authorized purpose — to pay back the money improperly burned through during Mr. McGintee’s time. Correspondence from the state comptroller’s office appears to say that local government cannot borrow to build a slush fund, even by accident.

     What Mr. Bernard apparently would like to do is apply the surplus to town employee benefits or retirement funds. Depending on how you look at this, as a good idea or a trick, the fact is that once the money is gone, it will have to come from taxes in subsequent years.

    At this point, the only reasonable course for the over-borrowing, and one that would benefit taxpayers in the long run, appears to be to set it aside to repay what is owed, not to stave off tax increases for political advantage.

   Representative Tim Bishop’s victory over Randy Altschuler Tuesday despite the astounding amount of super PAC money — $3.4 million — that fell upon the First Congressional District, gives testimony to the voters’ ability to think for themselves. Everywhere you turned in the last few weeks, you saw or heard the attack ads paid for by a seemingly bottomless pool of dollars — radio, television, the Internet.

    These days, with advertisments able to reach into places where Web visitors live, you were likely to see  false and trumped-up allegations of corruption against Mr. Bishop by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Then other baseless claims would pop up while you were watching a how-to video on YouTube, for example. Mr. Bishop was even targeted by gun-sight imagery. Voters weren’t buying it.

    The millions didn’t suffice to oust Mr. Bishop, but they did demean a race between two viable, if very different, candidates. Mr. Altschuler has impressed us as a nice guy and a political moderate, who may have been, if elected, as hands-on as the effective Mr. Bishop. If given the opportunity, even he might have vetoed the most vicious assaults made on his behalf. In the weird world of unregulated spending, there is only one rule: the candidate has no control.

    Attack ads also debased the contest for the White House. A group supporting the president claimed that Mitt Romney, in effect, was responsible for killing a woman who had cancer because her husband lost his health insurance when Mr. Romney’s investment firm closed the man’s plant. On the other side of the coin, an ad on behalf of Mr. Romney howled that Mr. Obama was a racist, prejudiced against whites.

    It would be nice to read Mr. Bishop’s win as a local rejection of unregulated campaign spending. That, of course, is a difficult call to make. What is certain is that the democratic process would be improved if the influence of money was reduced.

    The line of the night, however, came from Representative Bishop, who, savoring his win, declared, “My opponent had the guys with the biggest checks, but I had the guys with the biggest hearts.” 

   Sunday is Veteran’s Day, traditionally a time when organizations that aid those who have served in the United States armed forces are beneficiaries of increased charitable giving. This year, as the region’s attention is centered on communities reeling from Hurricane Sandy’s flood waters and prolonged power outages, there is a fear that veterans groups might see a dip in what they receive.

    For the East End, the Wounded Warrior Project is prominent, notably because of its close partnership with Soldier Ride, which was founded here in 2004 by Chris Carney and which shows support and raises money for returning veterans with a cross-country bike trek. Now annual rides are held around the country.

    There are myriad organizations that help look out for and provide care, job training, and other support for America’s veterans. As we dig into our pockets to help those left shaken by the passing storm, we must also remember those veterans who served and for whom, in many cases, the injuries will last a lifetime.

   Pity the poor New York voter confronted with Tuesday’s ballot and a top of the ticket that really was not in play here. New York has been a reliably “blue” state, going for the Democratic presidential candidate most of the time since the Great Depression, and in an unbroken streak since 1988.

    This means that those who voted for the Republican or one of the minor-party presidential choices were to an arguable degree disenfranchised. Doing away with the Electoral College, in which all of a state’s votes are apportioned in a winner-take-all format, could correct this inequality. Consider that only nine so-called swing states actually decided the 2012 presidential election — not one of them our own New York.

    One line of thinking about abolishing the Electoral College goes like this: It would end the potential injustice inherent in a candidate’s winning the popular vote but losing the election. It would give the country’s more populous urban areas more clout and would probably increase voter turnout by energizing voters in the largest states. And it would for the first time embody the democratic ideal of one person, one vote, in the most important single contest in the land.

    For New Yorkers, doing away with the archaic system with its roots in a post-Colonial era in which only landed white men could vote, would be a step forward. It would also give the candidates incentives to do more than swing through seeking donations, as both the Obama and Romney campaigns did this summer, while not bothering to slow down long enough to hear what the people of this great state — particularly those in counties that had gone “red” in recent elections — had to say.

    California’s Legislature has passed a law that would award its Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote — provided enough other states followed suit. New York should throw its muscle — and its 16.7-million residents of voting age — behind this movement.

   Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but our hunch is that the police checkpoints intended to curb drunken driving this summer were a success. Word filtered out that even a couple of drinks could land someone behind bars for the night and result in fines or the loss of driving privileges for months, even on a first offense. This is good news for those who prefer safer roads, and it merits a tip of the hat for the many local officers, as well those from other departments, who put in long nights here to make this happen.

    Over Labor Day weekend, for example, Suffolk County officers helped log eight arrests on Saturday night alone in Southampton Village. East Hampton Town police had 19 D.W.I. arrests during the weekend. In mid-July, Operation Nitecap, in which state, county, town, and Sag Harbor and East Hampton Village police staffed two checkpoints, resulted in 20 arrests in an eight-hour period. Police were helped by money from a county Stop-D.W.I. fund, which helps pay for the overtime required when additional officers are called in during the long processing of most drunken driving cases.

    Unlike the usual handful of late-night stops in which an officer will spot a swerving car or broken taillight on a vehicle driven by one of the usual suspects, the checkpoints produced a wide cross-section of allegedly drunken drivers. Outrage from some, however, greeted the police effort. One person in high dudgeon even wrote to several South Fork newspapers protesting that a psychiatrist who found himself in handcuffs in July had been subjected to something “right out of Nazi Germany.” This was nonsense, of course, but it spoke to a certain sense of entitlement among some of our summer visitors.

    Having read in these pages about far too many motor vehicle accidents over the years, we know that the view that a couple of drinks can’t hurt you when you are behind the wheel is far from accurate. We applaud the law-enforcement initiative and think there should be more of them. There are still far too many drunken drivers on the roads. Efforts like these help get the message out that sometimes it is better to hand the car keys to someone else or call a cab.

   Rarely does a federal policy have as direct a potentially positive impact on the South Fork as does one put in place earlier this year by President Obama to allow some children of undocumented migrants a way to avoid deportation and work here legally. Called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, it allows immigrants 30 and younger who have lived in the United States for five or more years to apply for a Social Security number and a two-year, renewable work permit.

    So far, the number of people signing up has been less than expected; at least 1.2 million people could benefit, according to low estimates. Part of the less-than-expected enthusiasm has to do with the presidential election. Mitt Romney has said that he would “supersede” the program with one of his own. Other speculation is that some younger immigrants fear that sharing their personal information with authorities could lead to trouble for family members also here illegally. The government has gone to some lengths to dissuade that notion, insisting that personal details will remain private.

    Critics have said that the executive order to create the Deferred Action program was a political stunt to shore up the president’s support among Latino voters. This may be true to a degree, but the program is still something that some South Fork residents should seriously consider taking advantage of. Law-abiding business owners could gain as well from the program, which would broaden the pool of available workers while reducing the headaches and legal risks of using illegal labor. Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Bridgehampton National Bank in Bridgehampton, Congressman Tim Bishop is to host an informational meeting for those interested in applying.

    In the end, deferred action is an inadequate substitute for a comprehensive and sensible national immigration reform, something President George W. Bush backed but for which he was vilified from the right. It is, however, a reasonable initial step.

   It is a story we dreaded. An East Hampton High School student apparently committed suicide late last week, and some of those who knew him have drawn a direct connection from what is being described as a deliberate, tragic act to his being bullied because he was gay or perceived by others as gay.

    Few details have emerged at this point about the life of David Hernandez Barros, who was 16, but we have been told fellow students at East Hampton High School bullied him. In a powerful letter to the editor of this newspaper this week, a former student at the high school said that he himself had considered committing suicide because of the self-hatred engendered by the hateful insults directed at him by his peers. David’s struggle, he wrote, was “similar to the ones many of us face growing up in this community.” If this is the status quo, it is unacceptable.

    Learning of David’s death on Saturday, Richard Burns, the superintendent of the East Hampton School District, issued a  statement calling the death tragic and saying he was truly saddened. His office and Adam Fine, the high school principal, offered counseling for students and faculty. Representatives of the Family Service League’s Joe’s Project, a suicide-prevention initiative, have been invited to speak with students. Meetings were said to be ongoing about how to respond further.

    Nationally, bullying of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender students is considered epidemic. Shocking statistics were cited in the media following the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman, who leaped into the Hudson River last year after a video was posted online showing him kissing another young man. Other recent deaths in similar circumstances have been of a 13-year-old boy in Texas, another in Minnesota, and a 15-year-old in Indiana. A majority (and far more in some surveys) of G.L.B.T. youth are said to have been the targets of bullying for who they are.

     Whether or not a detailed explanation of David’s apparent decision to end his life emerges, a shared sense is that anti-gay harassment right here in East Hampton was a cause, if not the cause. School and community leaders must address this perception — focusing on the alleged attackers, not just their victims.

    Our deepest sympathy goes to David’s family and his friends. May the community rally in their support.

   An article in The Wall Street Journal last week pointed out parallels between the race for the presidency and that for New York’s First Congressional District. The core of its observation was that in both contests centrist incumbents are pitted against wildly wealthy challengers.

    In the First District race as in the contest for the presidency, the candidates are intelligent men with differing views on the role of government and the direction of the country. This should make for substantive exchanges. Instead, Mitt Romney’s campaign charges that President Obama has not done enough to help the economy, while the Democratic refrain is that Republican policies would destroy Medicare and the middle class. In the First Congressional District, mailboxes, radio stations, and television channels are spilling over with such assaults as Mr. Bishop’s claim that Mr. Altschuler would outsource the American work force and Mr. Altschuler’s denigrating Mr. Bishop as merely a “career politician.”

    And the campaign is getting worse in a hurry, particularly in an effort on behalf of Mr. Altschuler by an anonymously funded political action committee founded by George W. Bush and Karl Rove. According to a Politico report from last week, Crossroads GPS, a conservative political action committee that is not required to disclose its donors, is making the Bishop-Altschuler race the first of its 2012 Congressional targets. The PAC’s first salvo is a television ad repeating allegations that Mr. Bishop acted improperly in seeking fireworks permits for a constituent who was later solicited by his daughter for a campaign donation. The ad also repeatedly uses a circular graphic that appears to be the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

    The use of gun-sight imagery is worse than unfortunate, and has no place in reasonable political campaigns. While Mr. Altschuler may not have personally signed off on the ad — given the supposed firewall between Super PACs and the candidates they support — he should disavow it and demand its retraction. It seems unlikely that Crossroads GPS might have forgotten that less than two years ago Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a mentally disturbed man outside an Arizona supermarket and that, in the aftermath of the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee was decried for its use of gun-sight imagery in “targeting” 20 House Democrats in the previous November’s election, including Ms. Giffords.

    For a country as saturated with guns and gun violence, and whose commitment to the treatment of the mentally ill is demonstrably inadequate, the use of such images in political campaigns is wholly irresponsible. If Mr. Altschuler fails to demand that the Crossroads GPS ads putting his opponent in the line of fire be removed from circulation, one can only conclude that he is a candidate willing to say or do whatever it takes to win.