In any election, politicians’ pretty much always-false modesty prompts them to exclaim that they themselves are playing but a part in the march of history. Obama cut an ad that admitted:

“Sometimes, politics can seem very small – but the choice you face? It couldn’t be bigger.”

Last week, Paul Ryan made a feint at bipartisanship with a similar argument:

“Mitt and I have a message that’s bigger than party.”

Hurricane Sandy reminds us of what truly monumental events, and the decisions we make in the face of them, look like.
Sandy is not just bigger than any campaign and powerful enough to banish all the feeble fantasies humans s have about our relationship to the physical world. Though Sandy may finally bring a discussion about the environment to the forefront of politicians’ minds, one of humanity’s only creations that’s almost impervious to the kind of force battering the US east coast is denial. (Then again, note the Earth’s stubborn, intractable reactions to our abuse.)
We can talk about “man-made” climate change, but there’s a difference between having control over something and taking responsibility for it. Our part in global warming is more like that of someone dropping a lit cigarette in the forest, rather than someone starting a fire for heat.
As for arguments about who did or didn’t “build that” – Sandy don’t care. Buildings are flimsy and our plans even more insubstantial; our opinions revealed to be nothing more than spit and a wish for wind in the right direction.
You can sense among political professionals a vague sense of panic about Sandy, which is ancillary to the more specific and very real worries that they harbor about loved ones and their own, mostly likely east coast, lives.
We don’t yet know Sandy’s precise impact on the election – on a practical level, the storm will disrupt early in-person voting, rallies in east-coast states will go unattended, ads may be inescapable when people are driven indoors, or they may be unwatched in places that lose power. Beyond that immediate effect, will Sandy wash away political trivia and remind voters of the true stakes of picking a president? Will these disruptions freeze the race where it is, or will Sandy remind people of the stakes involved in picking a leader, swaying them toward the one who seems the safer choice?
The magnitude of the storm should underscore, not contrast, the relationship between the people’s will and predictions that existed before. It’s not as though pundits and pols had any better idea of what would happen prior to Sandy’s landfall. This election has been unprecedented on so many levels, you couldn’t even tweet them all: the amount of money being spent, the ideological divide between the parties, the infuriating vagueness of one candidate’s ideas.
Sandy is just another element beyond control: you can’t even poll a storm – much like the ideas of low-information, undecided voters, it’s nothing but a resounding, echoing howl.
The Frankenstorm – an appellation that would make Mary Shelley wince at the lack of a possessive, though she might approve of the sentiment – is an immediate, measurable reminder that politics is, in the end, not about messaging and postures and positioning, but the structure of people’s lives: who they can turn to when they have no resources left themselves, who they can look to when all the options are bad, and what they can do with what they have left when it seems like nothing at all.
We’re not choosing the nation’s CEO, a boss-in-chief. Mitt Romney‘s approach to poor performance is eliminating jobs, it’s only Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) employees he could fire – and he’s said he wants to – not the natural disaster itself. You can’t put the bravery of first responders on a balance sheet, or quantify human loss.
Whoever becomes president, the job is really that of a community organizer – whether that’s the role they’re prepared for or not.