“There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement, that is a factual statement,” Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, said. He was right about the urgent need to talk about climate change; even if the origin of Hurricane—or rather “Superstorm”—Sandy is a mystery of weather randomness, it is undeniably true, as Cuomo put it, that “we have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns.” (Elizabeth Kolbert has more on that.) But he was very wrong about another thing: what he said is a political statement, or ought to be. Refusing to have a political conversation about climate change now is akin to the insistence that the aftermath of a mass shooting is somehow an improper moment to talk about America’s gun laws.
And not only about climate change. Sandy’s name is not written on any ballot, but it, as much as that of any candidate, encapsulates a raft of problems, contradictions, and challenges that belong at the center of this campaign. These include the role of government, taxes, and budgets at every level; infrastructure priorities; as well as basic questions of trust and community. Even if there is no time to stop and talk—if the main thing is getting people to shelters in New Jersey, clearing roads in West Virginia, or somehow getting the water out of the seven subway tunnels in New York, there are plenty of political acts to observe and choices to assess. Politicians on both sides might stop being scared of saying so.
There is, when the lights go out or people are standing in the wreckage of their homes, a tendency toward a certain delicacy. As Politico put it on Tuesday, “Candidates are taking every precaution not to appear like they’re politicizing deadly Hurricane Sandy.” We are then asked to entertain the idea that President Obama visibly doing his job, or Mitt Romney absurdly soliciting second-hand cans of soup (“We’re going to box these things up in just a minute and put them on some trucks, and then we’re going to send them into, I think it’s New Jersey”) are not political—that these acts are alternatives to politics. But that would be to misunderstand, fundamentally, what it means to be political.
In the most practical sense, Sandy is now part of Election Day. Ten states are disaster areas, and the estimates for when things will be back to normal, or even just workable, are converging with or stretching well past Tuesday, November 6th. The campaign may, in some areas, including the swing state of Virginia, have effectively ended. For some people, it may be hard to simply get to the polls; Sandy may suppress more votes than Pennsylvania’s voter I.D. laws ever might have. If candidates can’t edge their way into television time in other ways, their responses to Sandy are among the last things voters have to look at. That might not be so bad, and more illuminating than a national obsession with some stray out-of-context remark. If Sandy is a surprise last-minute pop quiz, it’s a fair one. Both candidates have studied for this.
The Sandy response is partly a matter of appearances, but not entirely. On Wednesday, President Obama will be in New Jersey with Governor Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, whose keynote speech at the Republican National Convention was about how “we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved.” During this crisis he has loved the one he’s with, praising Obama for being the opposite of paralytic: talking about the attention and his own lack of sleep, Christie said, “The President woke me up one time, which is O.K.—he gets to.” But it isn’t just a matter of what the President “gets to” do; it is what he is doing—if he messed up the basics of emergency response, he’d rightly pay a political price—and what he has argued for throughout his political career.
The same can be said of his opponent. As John Cassidy writes, Mitt Romney has “a Chris Christie problem” at the moment, and it is closely related to what Cassidy calls his “FEMA problem.” Romney has disparaged the idea that we, as a country, might usefully organize responses to disasters—as if floods and storms watch highway signs, or there was no value in the sort of expertise one can gather at, say, the National Hurricane Center, or that we even might care about our neighbors across state lines beyond being moved by pictures on television and emptying our cupboards. (There is nothing in mine that will repair a bridge.) In a Republican primary debate, as Cassidy notes, Romney talked specifically about trading in FEMA for a state-by-state system, or even privatizing it. At the moment, he is avoiding questions about FEMA, instead talking about sympathy for victims and Red Cross donations. The canned-food collection was one of the activities at what really did appear to be a campaign rally in Ohio, at which Romney also told what was meant to be an amusing story about Katrina evacuees being surprised at how cold it was in Massachusetts. (Luckily, the locals gave them things like “TV sets and clothes.”)
Private charity, and his personal generosity, have been Romney’s default answers to questions about matters like his taxes and affinity for the so-called forty-seven per cent. His answer to climate change is to make jokes, as he did at the G.O.P. convention. It’s an issue that Obama has been avoiding as well. Treating Sandy as an event separate not only from politics generally but from the politics of this particular campaign would be a profound mistake.
Obviously, one has to choose one’s moment. Berating one’s opponent in a washed-out house, to people left homeless, is less politicizing than bungling: politics, after all, includes the arts of rhetoric and persuasion, and an instinct for understanding. All of those things—practicality, leadership, sympathy and obligation, a philosophy of government—are elements of what we come up with when we try to figure out what politics means, and means to us.
President Obama was praised for saying, as he was concluding a briefing on Sandy, “I am not worried at this point on the impact on the election. I’m worried about the impact on families and our first responders. The election will take care of itself next week.” That may have been a politic thing to say, but the denial that disasters have anything to do with politics is in itself a denial of reality. Elections can’t always just take care of themselves, and neither can people who need shelter from a storm.
See our full coverage of Hurricane Sandy.
Photograph by Ruddy Roye. See a slide show of Roye’s coverage of Sandy at Photo Booth.
