Frankenstorm Stalls Election Coverage

by Amanda Walters
aw393308@ohio.edu

 Hurricane Sandy, also known as Frankenstorm, is making it’s way to the east coast only nine days before the election. 

All across New York and Washington DC, people are being evacuated and everything is at a standstill. This crisis is pushing politics to the sideline.

President Barack Obama says he will not be making any campaign appearances during the storm so he can focus on aiding victims of the storm. 

The Obama campaign has also stated that it will not send out any campaign emails during the storm. Both Vice President Joe Biden and Governor Mitt Romney canceled events in Virginia this weekend.

What could this storm mean for the election? Could some people be unable to get to the polls because of the aftermath of the storm?

Like many other news outlets that attempted to conjecture about the political effects of the storm, CBS couldn't help but ask these questions even while people are wondering about their own future. They even asked if the storm could be this election's October Surprise. 

I believe that they should have taken the high road instead of wasting time conjecturing about what the massive storm could mean for politics. For many people on the east coast right now, there are things much more important than politics. 

While most of the focus of their online and afternoon broadcasts were on the storm, that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything going on in the world of politics.  

CBS Morning did a story on how one liberal and one conservative see themselves and why they identify with that term. The “Liberal vs. Conservative” title of the video is a bit unnerving because it fills into the paradigm that pins one camp against the other.

Nancy Giles, who identifies herself as liberal, talks about her idea of what it means to be a liberal. For her being a liberal means that she enjoys the diversity within our country.

Ben Stein, a conservative, also discussed what being a conservative means to him. He, more than Giles, talked about actual policy that describes someone with conservative beliefs.

While I understand that this story was meant to help each side get back to the basis of what their side is fighting for, I think that it just became semantics.

The definitions Giles and Stein both give for each side sound like something you would have a lot of trouble going against, but the definition means nothing without knowing what policies fall where.  While they were trying to bring people together, it just shows how far apart we’ve truly gotten.