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Now is the time
This is a moment for the president to show that he is not W. No reading My Pet Goat, no flyovers while New Orleans drowns, no phoney aircraft carrier landings. Now is the time for President Obama to show proactive leadership.
There is an unprecedented storm coming. Obama needs to do an Oval Office broadcast and tell the American people just what the federal government is doing to prepare for it. The he needs to give a synopsis of what the governors of the relevant states are doing to prepare for it. Then he needs to tell us what he wants us to do to prepare for it, and during it because communications may be down for a while.
If he can pull it together in time he should announce some website or other information clearinghouse that folks can use to access information. A cellphone app or text service would not be a bad idea either, since most modern landline phone systems are now dependent on electricity.
On 9/11, it was Primary Day in NY. I was at the campaign HQ of Tom Suozzi who was in a primary with now New York Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, working on the first election monitoring program I had ever designed. Tom, who was running to be Nassau County Executive, was, I believe, at Penn Station meeting the trains full of commuters as they arrived for work to remind them to vote for him.
Then the planes hit. Tom called HQ and told us to gather up the resources we procured for GOTV, hundreds of box lunches for the volunteers, rented cellphones, vans for driving voters to the polls and volunteers to canvass and move it all to Glen Cove City Hall (Tom was then Mayor of Glen Cove) and set up City Hall as a crisis center. Workers installed a phone bank in the City Council conference room for evacuees to use to call their loved ones and let them know they were safe. Glen Cove at that time had a ferry system that connected us to lower Manhattan. He called up the ferry company and had them divert as many boats as possible to evacuation. He had the police and fire department set up a command center at the fire house. He got on our local news and asked for doctors and nurses and EMTs to come to Glen Cove to be ferried into lower Manhattan. Within a couple hours Glen Cove had the most efficient evacuation operation going that you could imagine.
Hundreds and hundreds of people were safely evacuated, were fed, called home and were started on their journeys home that day. That’s when I knew I was backing the right candidate. Last year, during Hurricane Irene, we had a different County Executive. The best he could manage was to hold a hearing long after the fact to explore why Long Island Power Authority was useless during the blackout and why the LIPA person who was embedded in his emergency bunker could not get any information out of LIPA.
President Obama needs to have a Tom Suozzi moment here. He has to act fast, act decisively and do what Ronald Reagan would do at a time like this, get in front of a camera and address the nation from the Oval Office.
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I’m also wondering how the upcoming election (and voting) might be adversely impacted by Hurricane Sandy in east coast and northeastern states? Should President Obama (and DHS/FEMA) prepare alternative voting sites and procedures (with affected states) just in case, maybe calling out national guard units to help? Both Republican voters and Democratic voters will be affected if Hurricane Sandy does turn out to be worse than Hurricane Irene, so will any effort be made to make sure every vote counts?
Good thread, Cynthia…speaking as someone who doesn’t care if he gets re-elected or not, it’s good advice, politically.
It also happens to be the right thing to do…to commit FEDERAL GOVERNMENT resources to deal with this, ASAP.
Let’s see if he does that, or is just into some more bipartisan coasting.
If he does this, the GOP will attack him for politicizing a natural disaster.
Which will then allow the MSM to refer to his address as “controversial”.
That is the country we now live in.
“…if he can pull it together in time…”
I know! He can pretend that he’s gone back in a time machine and wants Shirley Sherrod to resign before Fox News airs more bullshit about her “racism”…so he racks ass at the Department of Ag, and some flunky calls her while she’s on the way home from work and pressures her to quit. Twice.
That should furnish the required speed.
By the way: People with lots of glass windows who are in the path of the storm need to get to the local hardware store/lumber yard NOW and get some plywood to nail to their outside window frames. Since Sandy is predicted to hit as a Category 1, homes whose windows are sheathed in plywood should ride out the storm a lot better than those without plywood on the windows.
The problem is that he doesn’t want to be the boy that cried “wolf!” in case Sandy turns out to be little more than a Cat One storm. He has to walk a fine line between being overreactive and underreactive. Remember the crap that got tossed at Mark Dayton when he allowed his senatorial staff to work from home rather than come to Capitol Hill during the 2004 terror threat?
What’s Tom Suozzi doing now? If O was smart (and cared about the people in the affected areas), he’d make Suozzi the Sandy czar. I loved reading what a responsible elected official would do and did.
Good advice here, but o or his press sec should already have been out in front of people saying something about what to do and saying to watch for word from the pres.
o needs to say that we hope that it doesn’t turn out to be as bad as predicted, but it’s better to prepare for the worst than to be caught short. I think that he would get more criticism for under preparing than over preparing.
Maybe he’ll make pre-emptive concessions to the storm in hopes of finding “common ground” with it. That’s been his M.O. with Republicans.
Which would be to ask, “Am I still president? What year is this?”
Down here in the DC area, after the late June “derecho” storm, power was out in wide swaths of the city and the suburbs for about two weeks. If there is no power in the voting precincts, none of the tabulating machines will work (even paper ballots are counted by electronic scanners). At a minimum, a major power outage across a wide expanse of the East coast could delay the final vote count for days. Just what the wingnuts need to plot devious ways to destroy ballots and steal elections.
Exactly.
One of the big myths about Prematurely Orange is that he was wildly popular throughout all of his two terms. Maybe among the wet-pantied, corporate-financed Beltway Set, but hardly with the American public — especially after the Iran-Contra scandal broke. Bill Clinton was far more popular on average.
Both he and Romney seem to be watching and waiting. Romney’s not yet attacked him for not preparing — all both teams have done is to cancel a few weekend events in the southern seaboard states.
Maybe Obama should mention the possibility that this storm is a direct result of our destruction of the planet through carbon emmissions which seemed so unimportant during the faux debates ?
Nah…
Yes, being overly cautious, waiting for something like 99% forecast certainty (which is probably is). He should just go all Morgan Freeman/Deep Impact and start the selective evacuation now (donors first).
Haven’t the Republicans who brought you legitimate rape declared the storm a punishment for gay marriage? Or are they waiting until after it hits?
Pesonally I think the current resident in the White House is the more effective evil .
The other guys are obviously stupid and ignorant while the good guys sound reasonable but aren’t. Hell they are so smart they have managed to sell their voting block on “embracing the tar sands (Bill Clinton ) and cheerleading the renunciation of habeas corpus and the bill of rights .
Smarter than the other guys, they are and a more articulate evil. Plus Obama seems so likable … unless your one of the 3000 civilians whose deaths he personally signed off on in drone attacks.
The GOP’s Chris Christie — who as NJ Governor will be screaming for the Federal funds Paul Ryan wants to cut should the worst predictions come true about Sandy — already blew off a questioner who brought up climate change.
Sure Clinton, the most big business friendly democrat in history, was charming as he triangulated his way toward our present center right democratic party conundrum and eliminated Glass Steigel.
No one bears more responsibility for the democrats move to the right than Clinton.
Democracy is dead under the present system in America. Why lend it the stamp of credibility or continue enabling the offenders.
The government is no longer legitimate.
Well, if you think that Romney will blow up the system so well that he will cause tens of millions of FOX-and-CNN-warped minds to suddenly leap into the arms of Rocky Anderson or Jill Stein, you might want to think again.
We were lucky in the 1930s because we actually had an effective left that knew how to use movements like labor unions and the Democratic Party to its advantage. Far from shunning electoral politics, it was deeply involved in electoral politics. But then, with the McCarthy attacks and then the weakening of unions — as well as a fracturing of the coalition FDR had put together, when the economic liberals (unions, some Dixiecrats, etc.) and the social liberals (McGovern, RFK, etc.) declared war on each other as a result of Vietnam — the strain of far-left politics that urged a rejection of electoral politics grew ever stronger, even as the John Birchers and other conservatives got more involved in using electoral politics (and in fact swiped a ton of lessons from Saul Alinsky and other great ’30s organizers).
If Romney pulls a Hoover and causes things to get far worse than they are now, the American left is far too disorganized to take political advantage of his blunders. Instead, and with FOX News leading the way, it will be more like how 9/11 — which if it had occurred under Al Gore’s watch would have led to immediate calls for his impeachment (especially if he had, like Bush, blown off the CIA’s warnings because Bush’s PNAC buddies at the Pentagon told him that the CIA was being misled by Saddam Hussein) — resulted in the wagons being circled around Bush.
Agree. I dislike him even more than Bush. We did not get our habeas corpus back. On the contrary.
Which reminds me: Greece’s neo-Nazi “Golden Dawn” party may not yet have overtaken Syriza in popularity, but it’s already deeply embedded in the police forces. So when things really do collapse in Greece, who’s going to be best equipped to step into the power vacuum?
And Romney will bring it back?
Considering we have been having the worst drought in history in the bread basket where our food comes from and a little aberration like Occupy Wall Street spread around the world over night I wouldn’t be so sure about that . Things are poised to get a lot worse and that will definitely affect the complacency of the voting public .
In any case ignoring reality, refusing to call a spade a spade and doing PR for the democrats will not do anything to change our basic problem and quite likely prolong our agony way past our species expiration date. The mechanisms for democracy in America have collapsed, period and that assertion is based on facts .
This post sidesteps the essential reality of the present situation entirely . It would be good advice given to a new dictator to help them avoid the mistakes of his predecessor.
And lets not forget that he ran his last campaign against evil on restoring habeas corpus and basic civil liberties.
Apparently , no matter that the facts are a complete contradiction to the reality of the last campaign’s promises , as long as the democrats offer anything less than the unthinkable ( Assassination of Americans ?) the true believer is no more shaken by the facts than a fundamentalist nut job.
Sorry but that is the only way I can see it based on the evidence .
What will Romney do, assassinate us twice, turn up the bug on all our telephones or pay larger bribes for countries not to sign onto binding agreements on CO2 emmisions in order to derail future climate agreements ?
Hell I’m not even advocating a strategy to voting here. I see good arguments for voting Obama in a swing state , voting third party AND boycotting this election entirely. But the facts shouldn’t be left out because they show the democrats for what they are, supporters and defenders of torture , the police and surveillance state, the merger of the corporation with government(facsists)and a danger to all life on the planet half of which will be extinct in a few decades.
If the facts about the good guys are too taboo to discuss honestly than we are no longer having an intellectually honest conversation on the most important issues confronting us in our history and merely spouting party propaganda.
The first part of Matt Stoller’s essay at Salon.com – “The Progressive Case Against Obama” (a link is furnished at nakedcapitalism.com – comments in “Links”) spells it out very clearly. Under Bush, the top 1% got 65 cents out of every dollar spent. Under Obama, that 1% got 93 cents. And this happened mostly, Mr. Stoller points out, in the years 2009 and 2010, “when the Democrats controlled Congress.”[My bolds]
“…Home equity levels and corporate profits have never diverged in this way; what was good for GM had always, until recently, been good, if not for America, for the balance sheet of homeowners. Obama’s policies severed that link completely…”
The little people really don’t matter in this scenario. I don’t think we need an Oval Office address. I remember too well the one that said we’d do everything to help Haiti. We need a government of, for, and by the people, and we needed it in 2008.
Mr. Stoller gives a list of broken promises of this administration. I couldn’t bear to look at it.
Not as far as I can tell.
I’ve never voted for a Republican or third party yet, but Jill Stein gets my vote this year. The rest of the ticket I’ll vote straight Dem.
I didn’t forget. I’ve got a long memory on that issue.
I have to disagree with you on what you say is how “This post sidesteps the essential reality of the present situation entirely.” The post was to show what should be done by the pres to help the area threatened by the predicted storm and how a very proactive and intelligent leader operated in a specific crisis. The subsequent move into electoral politics is simply a by-product of the way the comments on threads expand. I do not like o, and I really do not see that reelecting him will redound to our nation’s benefit. In fact, I see a threat of complete disintegration with most of the 99% not seeing that the “two” parties are really one united to take their money and drive them into poverty. However true that may be, I believe it is outside the point of this post.
Perhaps you are right but the post begins with “This is a moment for the president to show that he is not W. No reading My Pet Goat, no flyovers while New Orleans drowns, no phony aircraft carrier landings. Now is the time for President Obama to show proactive leadership.”
The point of this post is advice on how to appear better as the lesser of two evils compared to our previous war criminal in the people house .
Perhaps that is a bit too pro Obama for my taste especially after a series of debates which never mentioned climate change or the disaster we are facing as a species as a result of the policies of this and previous administration which find dealing with reality to be bad for big business.
So at the expense of most life on the planet and our collective futures the greatest single issue facing us as a planet is swept under the rug.
Even Saddam had enthusiastic supporters. T health care under his dictatorship was better than what Americans will get under either of the candidates whose victory is assured by our elites .
Tweeted. Recommended. Great post Cynthia. I hope Obama’s people follow your common-sense advice.
Initial forecasts called for barometric pressure below 950 millibars. That’s absolutely unprecedented, a sh!t-load of wind and rain.
October 2010 storm strongest ever recorded on the Great Lakes
Heavy.
And I’ll bet no one will say or do anything to help the peasants
Who cares? They will put whoever they want in the whitehouse and it has nothing to do with the voters
LOL
Can someone who know about this than me, explain we extremely low barametric pressure is important — other than to the record book folks. The the decrease of pressure = the increase of somethign else?
Not too long after his inauguration, O went to New Orleans. But he never got off the plane. He just sat there on the runway and said some smarmy shit and then flew off. Now New York City does happen to contain Wall Street so maybe he’ll give it a little more love.
I’ll place my bet on the proposition that he don’t love anything but O and he won’t take time to say jack
Increase in wind and moisture
I just feel that the post was somewhat narrower than you see it. I agree on the points you make about the greater problems facing us that have been brought about by leadership that listens only to the 1%. I’m voting Jill Stein to deny legitimacy to either of the uniparty candidates.
He was inaugurated in January of 2009. Katrina happened in late August – early September of 2005, over three years earlier.
As for flooding events that occurred during his campaign, Obama directed his campaign staff to assist in sandbagging efforts along the Mississippi in the spring of 2008, and filled some sandbags himself. More importantly, he and his staff did things to ensure that they weren’t in the way of the local emergency crews:
Speaking of the big address:
I suspect that Obama doesn’t want to step on Cuomo’s toes — and to judge from Cuomo’s decision to shut down the subways at 7:00 pm tonight, he doesn’t need to; Cuomo seems to have a good understanding of what needs to be done and a willingness to do those things — but he is going to be back at the Oval Office after today to monitor the situation.
Maybe using “spade a spade” is alittle risky. Though I know the phrase; it is a bit out of date.
Yes, Katrina did occur three years before the inauguration. But the city was still struggling, as was much of the Gulf Coast, at the time of O’s inauguration. And he did fly to NOLA. And he did not get off the plane.