Storm’s threat puts campaigning on ice

Obama, Romney plug for Red Cross

President Barack Obama speaks Monday in the White House Briefing Room in Washington after returning from a campaign stop in Florida to monitor Hurricane Sandy.
President Barack Obama speaks Monday in the White House Briefing Room in Washington after returning from a campaign stop in Florida to monitor Hurricane Sandy.

— The presidential candidates suspended all their personal campaign activities Monday as President Barack Obama raced ahead of a dangerous Atlantic storm to convene a Situation Room meeting of the nation’s emergency officials and Mitt Romney called off all the events planned for himself and his running mate Monday night and today.

Both campaigns have halted fundraising across the East Coast in favor of an appeal to donors for Red Cross contributions. And both camps warned volunteers and staff members who live in the path of Hurricane Sandy to remain safe despite an election that is only eight days away.

Also Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was preparing for the possibility that widespread power failures and damage to polling places might not be remedied in some states in time for Election Day on Nov. 6.

“We are anticipating that based on the storm, there could be impacts that would linger into next week and have impacts on federal elections,” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said. “Our chief counsel’s been working on making sure that we have the proper guidance on how to support any actions that may be required” in areas that are declared disasters.

That includes determining whether states can be reimbursed for any work they must to do to fix or move polling places damaged in the storm. “This will be led by the states,” Fugate said. “We’ll be in a support role.”

Early Monday morning, Obama abandoned a planned Florida rally to fly back to the White House. The president addressed the nation about the storm from the White House briefing room just before 1 p.m.

In his statement, he alluded to the suspension of the campaign indirectly.

“This is going to be a big storm; it’s going to be a difficult storm,” he said. “The great thing about America is when we go through tough times like this, we all pull together. We set aside whatever issues we may have otherwise to make sure we respond appropriately.”

When a reporter asked about the effect on the campaign, the president said: “I am not worried at this point about the impact on the election. I’m worried about the impact on families, and I’m worried about our first responders.” He added: “The election will take care of itself next week. Right now our No. 1 priority is that we’re saving lives.”

Just before 11 a.m., Romney’s campaign announced that it had decided to cancel Romney’s scheduled event in Wisconsin on Monday night and his entire schedule today “out of sensitivity for the millions of Americans in the path of Hurricane Sandy.”

The Republican campaign had initially pressed ahead with Monday’s schedule despite the threatening storm and Obama’s decision to return to the White House.

At the end of a rally in Avon Lake, Ohio, on Monday morning, Romney offered his most extensive comments to date about the storm, asking the crowd to make a contribution to relief agencies and to volunteer their time to assist those in the hurricane’s path.

“There are families in harm’s way that will be hurt either in their possessions or perhaps in something more severe,” he said. “This looks like another time when we need to come together all across the country, even here in Ohio, and make sure that we give of our support to the people who need it.”

Hurricane Sandy had already scrambled the political calendar in the final week of the campaign, forcing Obama and Romney to call off events in Virginia and New Hampshire. Even so, the president flew Sunday night to Orlando, intending to attend a rally there Monday. Close to two dozen campaign events have now been scrapped on both sides.

Even as White House officials announced that Obama would speak to the nation about the storm, the president’s top campaign advisers convened a conference call with reporters to discuss the latest polling and the status of a race that remains very close.

The machinery of the campaign ground on. According to the United States Elections Project at George Mason University, about 15 million ballots already have been cast, including 1.8 million in Florida and 1.5 million in North Carolina.

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, and Jim Messina, the campaign manager, accused Romney’s campaign of continuing to bluff about the likelihood of victory in battleground states, and said Obama was confident of winning the election.

Axelrod conceded that the storm would affect the president’s ability to campaign in the near term but said that was necessary because Obama “has real responsibilities” to attend to.

Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton urged 7,600 people at the University of Central Florida on Monday to re-elect Obama based on his education, energy, environmental, health-care and economic record.

Clinton connected with the university student-heavy crowd by describing Obama’s plans for higher education, including the student-loan changes that tie payments to income while saving $60 billion on costs and then use that savings for Pell grants and research. Romney, he charged, wants to repeal the student-loan bill Obama pushed through Congress this past summer.

Clinton pressed other issues for Obama, as well. After saying Obama’s measures in solar and wind energy have created 150,000 jobs - a figure that recent statistics suggest is exaggerated - he urged reduction in carbon based fuels and concerns for long-term climate change.

Inside Romney’s headquarters in Boston, advisers were engaged in marathon conference calls about how and where to schedule his time in the midst of the storm. Earlier Monday, aides had concluded that Romney’s schedule could continue, but that changed quickly as the day’s events unfolded.

Romney’s allies put down $1.2 million for a last-minute television ad campaign in Pennsylvania seeking to portray that state’s race as close.

Obama’s campaign announced Sunday that it would suspend fundraising e-mails to the states directly affected by the storm, and Romney’s campaign did the same. And the Obama campaign said it would use its website, Twitter feed and Facebook page to urge people to donate to the Red Cross instead.

Romney’s campaign said Monday that he had been in touch with the governors of Virginia and New Jersey and that campaign workers in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and New Jersey would be collecting relief supplies to deliver to local emergency facilities. In Virginia, the campaign will be loading storm relief supplies onto the Romney bus for delivery, the campaign said.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael D. Shear, Mark Landler, Peter Baker and Michael Barbaro of The New York Times; by David Lightman and Erika Bolstad of McClatchy Newspapers; by Scott Powers of the Orlando Sentinel; and David Espo, Julie Pace, Steve Peoples, Brian Bakst, Norma Love, Beth Fouhy, Ken Thomas, Jim Kuhnhenn and Tom Krisher of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/30/2012

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