BY HENDRIK HERTZBERG
God—or, at least, various of His acts and intentions, as some perceive them—has been at the center of more than a few storms this autumn, and He has not always heeded the ritual calls of politicians to bless America. Nor has He been noticeably attentive to what one suspects are their most fervent prayers, regardless of whether their affiliation is Republican or Democratic—although, to quote a prominent pol who held office during an epoch of even greater polarization than ours, “the prayers of both could not be answered.” Anyway, Mr. Lincoln added, “the Almighty has His own purposes.”
That He does. In His own inscrutable, scrupulously bipartisan fashion, the Lord has kept Himself, and us, busy all fall. The political season’s first hurricane, Isaac, forced the Republicans to forgo the opening day of their National Convention, in Tampa. A week later, in Charlotte, Isaac’s meteorological hangover frustrated the Democrats’ plans for a spectacular outdoor finale to their Convention: no stadium like four years ago, no fireworks, no fake pagan temple. (That last touch was just asking for trouble.) As the campaign gathered speed, a variety of professionals offered conflicting interpretations of what theology requires. Cardinals stressed the perils of obliging health insurance to cover contraception; nuns emphasized the Gospels’ concern for the poor and powerless. Pentecostal pastors anathematized same-sex marriages as contrary to God’s law; mainstream ministers pointedly performed them as consonant with God’s love. An Indiana senatorial nominee said that when a rapist impregnates his victim “it is something that God intended to happen.” In the first television debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the President performed so poorly that he blew his painstakingly constructed lead in the polls—an error so otherwise unaccountable that divine (or, possibly, satanic) intervention seemed as good an explanation as any. And then came Hurricane Sandy.
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The largest tropical storm system in the recorded history of the Atlantic Basin was still an abstract swirl on the weather maps of American television when the flood of speculation about how it would affect the political fortunes of the Presidential contenders began to crest. It would hurt Obama, because it would interfere with early voting, which his organization was better positioned to exploit. It would hurt Romney, because power outages would limit the reach of the blitz of TV attack ads that pro-Republican Super pacs had planned for the campaign’s final week. It would hurt Obama, because its lingering aftereffects would depress Election Day turnout, especially among the poor, the frail, and the immobile. It would hurt Romney, because it would remind voters of the last Republican Administration’s catastrophic mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. It would hurt Obama, because low-information voters blame the incumbent executive for bad weather. It would help Obama, because it would enable him to “look Presidential.”
The storm came and, for one night, wiped away all such chatter. It came to the megacity at dusk, deceptively and unequally. If you were in an apartment in upper Manhattan, there was the whistle of wind, the swaying of trees, the patter of rain—nothing more, not even thunder and lightning. But in the lowlands, near the seashores, the harbors, the bays, the Sound, the river: apocalypse. The very ocean rose, tsunami-like, relentless, terrifying, bringing devastation by flood and wind and wind-whipped fire, and, for some ten million people in a swath a thousand miles wide and encompassing sixteen states, darkness and dread. By the weekend, the material damage was reckoned at fifty billion dollars, the human damage at a hundred dead, thousands homeless, and untold numbers of lives and livelihoods upended. The losses put Sandy second to Katrina in its destructive power. But its implications for the future, its intimations of what may be in store for us all, are far more dire.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” Ronald Reagan used that line many times, and he could always rely on getting a hearty laugh. Well, this week the government is very much here, and it is helping. The public employees whom 9/11 taught us to call “first responders”—the firefighters, cops, and sanitation workers—were here from the start. But this time the state authorities were ready. And, yes, the national government—“Washington,” that hated entity—was ready, too, and it has responded, on a vast scale and just as quickly.
On Wednesday, a pair of representatives of both levels of government, Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, and President Obama, together inspected the ruined coast of Christie’s state. Christie is a Republican, and not just any Republican: he was the keynote speaker at the Convention and has been one of Romney’s most valued campaign surrogates. A week before the storm, Christie had derided Obama as “blindly walking around the White House, looking for a clue.” But, if once the President was blind, the Governor seemed to suggest, now he can see—and the Governor, in turn, now saw the President differently. “Obama’s extraordinary leadership,” Christie said, was “outstanding,” “excellent,” “wonderful.” When a Fox News host asked him if he might make a similar tour with Romney, his reply was curt. “I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested,” he said. “If you think right now I give a damn about Presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”
Another public official, equally preoccupied with the storm, decided that he did give a damn about Presidential politics. Michael Bloomberg—three-term mayor of New York, ex-Democrat, ex-Republican, now a man without a party but not without a pulpit—is the nation’s most prominent high-information swing voter. On November 1st, he declared that he will be casting his vote for Obama. The storm, he wrote, “has brought the stakes of Tuesday’s Presidential election into sharp relief.” Even though, “like so many other independents, I have found the past four years to be, in a word, disappointing,” the stakes, in the Mayor’s view, are high, and the two nominees and their parties “offer different visions of where they want to lead America”—on education, on marriage equality, on the direction of the Supreme Court, and, above all, on the warming of the earth and the rising of the seas that, virtually all scientists agree, are the work not of Providence but of people, and were factors in Sandy’s severity and in the likelihood of many more such catastrophes to come. One party “sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet,” the Mayor wrote. “One does not.” On November 6th, we will learn which will be entrusted with the power of the Presidency. Meanwhile, the oddsmakers have their odds, the pollsters their percentages, the pundits their hunches. What the voters will decree, in their wisdom or their folly, God only knows.
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