You might call President Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy many things, but don’t be fooled: he is only demonstrating superb leadership because he wants your votes. How do I know this? Well, the paragon of crisis management, Bush-era FEMA head Michael “heckuva job, Brownie” Brown, says so. Specifically, he said that Obama’s warnings about the storm were “premature”:

Brown, now a talk radio host in Colorado, said Obama was likely trying to get ahead of the storm politically.

“[He] doesn’t want anybody to accuse him of not being on top of it or not paying attention or playing politics in the middle of it,” Brown said. “He probably figured Sunday was a good day to do a press conference.”

As we now know, the storm was pretty bad, in the sense of being the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. Some people known to be partisan hacks had nothing but praise for how the president handled it. By “partisan hack,” I am referring to the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who explicitly refused to say anything mean about the president on Fox News. This is, of course, the news network that amended its bylaws in 2009 to require all on-screen presenters to say at least one bad thing about the president every 47 seconds. [Ed. note: that last sentence is not actually true, but dammit, it feels true to me.] Continue reading →