Hendrik Hertzberg and John Cassidy on Sandy and the election.

Summary

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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: Hendrik Hertzberg and John Cassidy on Sandy and the Election

Date: November 2, 2012
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guests: Hendrik (Rick) Hertzberg and John Cassidy

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Episode Overview

This episode, recorded just days before the 2012 presidential election and shortly after Hurricane Sandy, delves into how the disaster reshaped the political landscape. Dorothy Wickenden leads a conversation with New Yorker writers Hendrik Hertzberg and John Cassidy about President Obama and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's bipartisan response, Mitt Romney’s awkward position, and the storm’s implications on campaign momentum—especially concerning leadership, government competence, and issues like climate change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Chris Christie's Dramatic Turn & Bipartisanship

• Christie’s Shift in Rhetoric:

  • Just days before, Christie harshly criticized Obama’s leadership (see [01:31]). After Hurricane Sandy, he publicly praised the President for federal disaster aid and toured the devastated areas alongside Obama ([01:43]–[02:12]).
  • Notable Quote, Christie:

    "I think this is our sixth conversation since the weekend, and it's been a great working relationship to make sure that we're doing the jobs that people elected us to do." ([02:00])

• Impact on Political Optics:

  • John Cassidy describes the Obama-Christie tour as “one of the most riveting national and political events of the year” ([02:31]).
  • Cassidy observes the “astonishing” proximity and cooperation between two recent political foes.

2. Romney’s Campaign Hampered by Sandy

• Romney’s Dilemma:

  • Romney’s campaign finds itself sidelined. Cassidy likens Romney to "a man at sea... it's such a big boost for the president," as Obama visually embodies leadership (03:00–03:25).

  • Romney’s previous comments on FEMA and disaster relief (“send it back to the states and privatize where possible”) resurface, creating a stark contrast with Obama’s active federal response ([03:29]).

  • Notable Quote, Cassidy:

    "Romney very explicitly said that emergency relief should be sent back to the states and we should also explore privatization. He didn't qualify it in any way and it just sort of hung out there for a year and then has now come back to bite him." ([03:29])

• Ineffective Optics:

  • The Romney campaign’s canned goods photo op is criticized as performative and ineffectual, especially since the Red Cross doesn’t welcome such donations ([05:30]).

3. Disaster Response, Competence, and Political Advantage

• Historic Parallels:

  • Wickenden brings in the story of Herbert Hoover’s political ascendance following his management of the 1927 Mississippi flood ([04:10]–[05:30]), drawing a parallel to Obama’s current moment.
  • Rick comments:

    “Competence is a factor sometimes hidden, sometimes open in pretty much every presidential election… Competence is something that the president is showing right now, and Christie is showing it, too.” ([05:30])

• Internal GOP Divisions:

  • The storm casts light on ideological fractures within the Republican Party between “old school” proponents of federal power and modern advocates for state/local or privatized solutions ([06:38]).

4. Media Perception and Broader Impact

• National vs. Local Relevance:
  • Hertzberg cautions that while Sandy’s impact looms large in media and particularly in New York (where many journalists reside), for much of the country “this is a fairly distant television show” ([07:50]).
  • Obama’s favorable handling of the crisis is a net plus, but its ultimate electoral benefit is difficult to quantify.

5. The Untouched Issue: Climate Change

• Campaign Silence:

  • Despite Sandy’s severity, both candidates avoid directly addressing climate change.
  • Bill Clinton, campaigning for Obama, is the main political figure to invoke global warming in light of the storm ([09:04]).
    • Notable Quote, Clinton:

      “He [Romney] ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming... In my part of America, we would like it if someone could have done that yesterday.” ([09:04])

• Obama’s Record & Rhetoric:

  • Rick notes that Obama attempted action with a cap-and-trade bill, which failed in the Senate, leading to a softening of climate change rhetoric (09:35).
  • Cassidy and Wickenden both argue Obama could and should have done more on the issue ([10:26]–[10:28]).

6. Congressional Gridlock and the Path Forward

• Speculation on Election Outcomes:
  • It’s likely Democrats retain the Senate and Republicans hold the House, risking continued gridlock ([11:02]–[11:15]).
  • Obama’s hope for more bipartisan cooperation “because there isn't another election on the horizon” is labeled potentially “wishful thinking.”

7. Final Election Predictions

• Electoral College vs. Popular Vote:
  • Despite the closeness of the race, all agree Obama has an electoral advantage ([12:07]).
  • Cassidy acknowledges Republican arguments about potential polling errors stemming from 2008 turnout models but still expresses confidence in an Obama win—with a caution that a late swing could shift several states ([12:24]).
    • Notable Quote, Cassidy:

      “I'd bet on Obama, but he only needs a 2 or 3% swing from where the polls are now in places like Ohio and Iowa to do it... it's not a foregone conclusion.” ([13:20])

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Memorable Quotes

• Chris Christie on working with Obama:

  "It's been a great working relationship to make sure that we're doing the jobs that people elected us to do." ([02:00])

• John Cassidy on Obama’s advantage:

  "He gets to act presidential in a terrible national emergency a week before the polls that surely can only help him." ([03:00])

• Rick Hertzberg on competence:

  "Competence is something that the president is showing right now, and Christie is showing it, too." ([05:30])

• Bill Clinton on climate change:

  "In my part of America, we would like it if someone could have done that yesterday." ([09:04])

• John Cassidy’s prediction:

  "I'd bet on Obama, but it's not a foregone conclusion." ([13:20])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:31] Chris Christie’s previous criticism and sudden praise of Obama
• [02:12] Obama-Christie tour discussed and media response
• [03:00] Impact of Sandy on Romney’s campaign
• [03:29] Romney’s position on FEMA resurfaces
• [04:10] Historical parallels: Hoover and the 1927 flood
• [05:30] Importance of perceived competence; Romney’s food drive
• [06:38] GOP divisions on federal disaster response
• [07:50] National vs. local relevance of Sandy’s impact
• [09:04] Bill Clinton’s climate change remarks post-Sandy
• [09:35] Obama’s shifting climate change policies
• [11:02] Congress and gridlock in a second Obama term
• [12:07] Likelihood of Obama’s electoral college advantage
• [13:20] Final pre-election predictions

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Tone

The conversation is candid, analytical, and subtly laced with the wry, sophisticated humor characteristic of New Yorker writers. The tone is thoughtful and appropriately skeptical, with an undercurrent of urgency stemming from both the political stakes and the havoc wrought by Sandy.

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Transcript

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[Dorothy Wickenden]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, November 1st. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor at the New Yorker. At a Mitt Romney rally less than two weeks ago, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had some unkind things to say about President Obama.

[Chris Christie]

He's like a man wandering around a dark room, hand up against the wall, clutching for the light switch of leadership, and he just can't find it. And he won't find it in the next 18 days.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

But on Tuesday, after the hurricane, Christie was boasting on national television about his late night phone call from the president and praising his outstanding, outstanding job on federal disaster relief to the state. On Wednesday, he and Obama toured the devastation in coastal New Jersey by air, and he said at a press conference.

[Chris Christie]

Afterward, I think this is our sixth conversation since the weekend, and it's been a great working relationship to make sure that we're doing the jobs that people elected us to do.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Hendrick Hertzberg and John Cassidy are here to discuss the effects of the storm on the presidential race and how and what the candidates are doing in the final days. John Politico described the Christy Obama appearance yesterday as one of the most riveting national and political events of the year. Was that just horseraise hyperbole or do you agree?

[John Cassidy]

I mean, this was an amazing event. You know, the President of the United States six days before his reelection, touring devastation with a man who, as you say, was, you know, weighing into him, calling him a hopeless leader only two weeks ago. And there they are at the Brigantine Utter having what looked like a love match to me. It's been an astonishing few days, both for Obama and for Christie and for the race itself.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Well, and how has it affected the way Romney's campaigning?

[John Cassidy]

Well, I mean, Romney is just sort of like a man at sea. What can he do? He stayed in Ohio for a couple of days. He finally flew to Florida yesterday. It's not so much that this is damaging for Romney, although it is. It's just, it's such a big boost for the president. He gets to act presidential in terrible national emergency a week before the polls that surely can only help him. And then his opponent is handicapped by something he said in the debates a year ago, which has, you know, come back to haunt him.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

What was that debate and what was Romney actually saying?

[John Cassidy]

This was a CNN debate in June 2011 when all the Republican candidates were still in the race, including, you know, a lot of very right wing ones. John King, the moderator, asked all the candidates about the scope of government and how they would limit government and basically went round the table and people said they'd eliminate this, they'd eliminate that. When it got to Romney, John King said, well, what about FEMA and emergency aid? He said he'd just been out in some state which had had an emergency and they were running out of money. You know, what should be done with fema. And Romney very explicitly said that emergency relief should be sent back to the states and we should also explore privatization. He didn't qualify it in any way and it just sort of hung out there for a year and then has now come back to Biden.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And the press, unsurprisingly, has been making a big point about George W. Bush's bumbling response to Katrina. And that, of course, was one of the reasons Republicans suffered badly in the 2006 midterm elections. Rick, just going back further in American history, I want to just bring up something that our friend David Greenberg, who's an American historian at Rutgers, told me a while ago, which was that in 1927. When the Mississippi river overflowed, it swept away levees in southern Illinois and Mississippi, and that was the country's worst natural disaster until Katrina. And President Coolidge didn't really like his commerce secretary, who happened to be Herbert Hoover, who liked to take charge of any administration effort he could. Coolidge called Hoover wonder boy for that tendency, but he put Hoover in charge of the federal rescue and reconstruction effort. And in the next election, Hoover used footage as a centerpiece of his campaign. He made a film called Herbert Master of Emergencies, and it showed aerial shots of submerged towns, close ups of grateful children who were being fed by Hoover's teams, and it helped Hoover win the presidency. What do you make of that vis a vis Romney with his canned goods photo op in Ohio this week? You know, promising to box them up and put them on trucks and send them into, as he put it, I think it's New Jersey.

[Rick]

Yeah, that's fascinating about Hoover. Competence is a factor sometimes hidden, sometimes open in pretty much every presidential election. Competence doesn't get you all the way there, as Michael Dukakis amply demonstrated, and George W. Bush demonstrated it in a different way. But competence is something that the president is showing right now, and Christie is showing it, too. And that's kind of what's holding them together in a way that's got to be frustrating for Governor Romney, who, as you say, put on this rather sad little show of collecting canned goods, which the Red Cross doesn't want anyway. The Red Cross discourages people from donating canned goods. They say we need the money. It's cheaper for us to buy the canned goods near the disaster site rather than have to worry about sorting them all out and shipping them across the country.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

It's also interesting to think about this Republican who was very effectively and proudly marshaling the efforts of the federal government on behalf of the American people. And this must put contemporary Republicans in an impossible bind, does it not, John?

[John Cassidy]

Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. I mean, you know, you've got this split in the Republican Party between. I guess you'd have to put Christie in the old school conservative on economic issues, but accepts that there's a big role for the federal government, especially when it comes to defense, national emergencies, things of that type. And the new school of Republicans who say that even in things like responding to national emergencies, it should be put back to the state, it should be privatized. Romney, in that fateful debate a year ago, actually said, you know, not just sent back to the states, but privatized, where Possible, but he was basically refusing to be outflanked on the right during that debate. So he went further than Michele Bachmann and other people who were involved in that debate. Well, obviously he was taking a calculation. It would never be mentioned again. I mean, what were the chances there was going to be a national disaster a week before the election? Very slim. But the odds have turned up against him and he's been hoist upon his own petard now. I mean, the great question having said all this, of course, is, you know, what impact is it having on the swing states out in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and other places? And we just don't know that yet. I think what we can say is that the momentum that Romney seemed to have last couple of weeks has certainly taken a blow. And there's no way to spin this as good news for Romney.

[Rick]

I don't think there's also no way that those of us who are sitting here on the island of Manhattan cannot somehow end up exaggerating the enormity of this as far as the rest of the country is concerned. I mean, we work at a magazine where half the people get to work because the subways are down and their electricity is out. And that's a big proportion of people in the blue state of New York. But it's a tiny proportion of the people in the United States of America for whom this is a fairly distant television show. It certainly turns out, at least so far, to be a plus for Obama. I worried before the storm, or thought before the storm, that it might be a minus simply because people blame the president for things that happen, and that includes disastrous storms. But he has assiduously worked to prevent that from happening and even turned it to his advantage. But how big an advantage, as always, in these matters remains to be seen.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Rick, as we discussed last week with David Remnick, one thing the candidates simply won't talk about is climate change. Bill Clinton did, though Obama's best surrogate on Tuesday on a campaign stop in.

[Bill Clinton]

Minneapolis in the first debate, the triumph of the moderate Mitt Romney. You remember what he did? He ridiculed the president, ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming in economically beneficial ways. He said, oh, you're going to turn back the seas in my part of America. We would like it if someone could have done that yesterday.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Rick, can Obama now raise that subject?

[Rick]

Well, he could certainly raise it in a second term and he could raise it gingerly. Now, in the last few days of the campaign, he did try to do something about climate change. Not Everyone remembers this, but the President and the House Democrats actually passed a climate change bill, the cap and trade bill, and it was killed in the Senate not because it didn't have a majority there, but because of the filibuster. And it looked like futility from then on to try and act on global warming per se. And the President changed his rhetoric toward energy independence, toward a kind of a sub rosa attack on climate change. But the President, unlike the Republicans, has tried to do something about this and is rhetorically committed to it, where the Republican Party has basically embraced a position of denialism.

[John Cassidy]

I think you're being a bit kind to the President here.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I do too.

[John Cassidy]

I do. Sure, he tried to push cap and trade through in the first two years and it didn't get through, but you know, he didn't try and bring it back. He hasn't taken any steps on the world stage to sort of, you know, promote some sort of successor to the Kyodo agreement. Obviously the principal cause of the fact they haven't done anything is Republican obstructionism. But most people in the environmental community are pretty critical of Obama and think that he, you know, he hasn't gone as far as he could even rhetorically to try and keep it as an issue now whether he'll do it in the second term. I mean, with the Republicans controlling Congress, which it seems they will, it's hard to see anything being done though.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

John, let me ask you about that. Do you think the Republicans will control Congress? It seems more likely now that Democrats will hold onto the Senate and that if Romney is elected, that could put a big crimp in his agenda.

[John Cassidy]

Yeah, sorry, when I say Republicans control, I mean they have veto power. It looks almost certain that we'll be back to the status quo ante with the Republicans controlling the House and the Democrats controlling the Senate but not having 60 votes so they can't break a filibuster. So we'll be basically Back to the 2010, 2012 Congress. Obama has said that the very fact there isn't another election on the horizon might improve relations and be able to get things done, not just on environmentalism, but on, you know, the big budget agreement and the fiscal cliff, et cetera. Some people think that's just wishful thinking. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Okay, this is our last program before the election. And Rick, I want to ask you, despite all the whipped up frenzy, but by us among others, about this exceedingly tight race. And it is tight. Doesn't it seem unlikely at this point that Romney could get the electoral votes he needs to win.

[Rick]

Well, so most of the analyses will tell us, and we are conceivably looking at a situation in which President Obama gets enough electoral votes to win, but Governor Romney gets a slight majority of the popular vote.

[John Cassidy]

I mean, I'm one of the pundits who's been saying that Obama is likely to win largely because the Electoral College favors him and he's still doing very well or reasonably well in Ohio. The one note of caution I would make is the one that Karl Rove and various other Republicans have been making. Obviously it's a very self serving point, but their argument is that the polls are not to be relied on because a lot of the polls use a 2008 turnout model when obviously there was a massive Democratic turnout and the polls suggest this year that Republicans are more enthusiastic. So there's a slight chance that, you know, the polls are wrong and that Republican turnout in states like Ohio and Wisconsin and Virginia and Florida will be higher than expected and the Democratic turnout lower than expected and there could be a shock result. I would put the chances of that happening at maybe sort of 1 in 3, 1 in 4.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Really. So you think even given what we're seeing with the electoral maps that Romney could get enough of those swing states that he could win?

[John Cassidy]

I don't think it's going to happen. I mean, I'd bet on Obama, but he only needs a 2 or 3% swing from where the polls are now in places like Ohio and Iowa to do it. I think Obama will win, but I'm just saying it's not a foregone conclusion.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Okay, thank you both. We'll be back next week to discuss the results. Hendrik Hertzberg is a political essayist and senior editor for the magazine and John Cassidy is a staff writer. There's daily political coverage of the election on newyorker.com this has been the Political Scene podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

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