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.]

The current FEMA director, Craig Fugate, subjected Brown to a bit of pwnage in response to Brown’s criticisms, noting that “It’s better to be fast than to be late.” Since most Republicans had the portion of their brains that allows for self-reflection surgically removed prior to the 2010 mid-term elections [ed note: also not technically true], the president’s continued competence left Brown with nowhere to go but further down:

Michael Brown, who ran the agency during Hurricane Katrina, told POLITICO Tuesday that he stood by his criticism that Obama moved too quickly federal relief and response to Sandy.

“In the context of the election, I simply said he should have waited,” Brown said. “The storm was still forming, people were debating whether it was going to be as bad as expected, or not, and I noted that the president should have let the governors and mayors deal with the storm until it got closer to hitting the coastal areas along the Washington, D.C.-New York City corridor.”

I’ll let Laura Clawson at Daily Kos apply the proper degree of STFU to Brown’s latest ploy for attention:

In the context of the election? No, see, disaster response is something you do not in the context of elections but in the context of disasters that need responding to. What Brown is trying to argue here is that Obama responded quickly because of the election, I think, but that would be an example of the soft bigotry of expecting Obama to respond to disasters at the level Brown’s old boss did.

Maybe Brown is right, though. Maybe President Obama is only exercising admirable leadership in this dire time of need because he thinks it will help him win the election. Maybe voters shouldn’t be fooled. We have to consider the question: If President Obama is reelected, what else might he do right???

Photo credit: “Brownies stacked on a plate” by Steph Laing (originally posted to Flickr as 7465 brownies ftmfw) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.