WASHINGTON: Superstorm Sandy muffled vitriolic campaigning a week from the US election, as President Barack Obama managed the aftermath yesterday and Mitt Romney faced a post-disaster political minefield.
Obama stayed in the White House, acting as a leader in the eye of crisis, wielding control of an emergency federal government operation through the night as murderous winds and floods swamped New York and New Jersey.
“I want everyone leaning forward on this,” Obama told a meeting of top-level disaster officials in the White House Situation Room yesterday, demanding creative thinking to help clear up the mess, a US official said. “I don’t want to hear that we didn’t do something because bureaucracy got in the way.”
Republican nominee Romney, left with few options with his antagonist off the trail, also put campaigning on hold, but tried to show compassion with a rally converted into a “storm relief” event in swing state Ohio. “A lot of people are hurting this morning. They were hurting last night, and the storm goes on,” Romney said.
Campaign teams were meanwhile left calculating ramifications of the storm, which effectively froze the race by muting the main protagonists and consuming news coverage a week from election day. Obama made the first move, announcing he had cancelled another day of campaign events, in Ohio today, so he could support recovery efforts.
But Romney announced he would go ahead with three events in the biggest swing state of Florida, where polls show him just ahead in a tight race.
The Republican has almost no route to victory if he loses the state, which has 29 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
Romney appeared to conclude that he could simply not allow another precious campaign day to go to waste with the race neck-and-neck before next Tuesday’s election. The storm meanwhile scrambled political battle lines as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a blunt spoken Obama critic, said his dealings with the administration had been “wonderful..”
“The president’s been great... I spoke to him three times yesterday,” Christie, said, adding that Obama had cut through bureaucratic “mumbo jumbo.”
“The president has been all over this, he deserves great credit ... He gave me his number at the White House, told me to call if I needed anything, and he absolutely means it,” Christie told MSNBC.
AFP
