Obama plays a stormer, campaigning to keep his job... by being presidential

It may look to America like US president Barack Obama is off the campaign trail.

He’s really not.

By commanding the response to a ferocious October storm a week before the election, Obama is employing a political advantage in the race to be president.

He is already the president.

Clearly, Obama’s imperative to act transcends the election. Superstorm Sandy’s wrath is real. At a time of death and danger, any president is expected to lead for the people of every state, battleground or otherwise. Yet in a political sense — and politics are absolutely part of this — Obama has a remarkable last-minute chance to campaign for his job — just by doing his job.

Republican nominee Mitt Romney can load canned food onto donation trucks; Obama can order aid and assets to the entire north-east corridor. Labelled by Romney as the big government guy, Obama is the one slashing red tape and telling governors to call him directly if they hit a single bureaucratic snag.

The presidential race is either tied or close to it in all the states that matter, so Obama is taking risks by halting days of official campaign events as Romney resumes them.

Every rally Obama scraps means one more missed chance to implore people to vote early, as many states allow, or to vote at all. The storm is consuming attention for much of the East Coast, particularly in New York and New Jersey, but has far less resonance in the key states where the weather is fine. And, of course, Obama can blow it.

Each major storm still occurs in the harrowing legacy of Hurricane Katrina, which is why Obama has offered declarations such as: “There are no unmet needs.”

Advisers to Obama said that, in a data-driven campaign, the storm emerged as an unpredictable factor — and, therefore, so is how voters will respond to Obama’s moves.

The politics of Obama’s storm response are not overt. The point is to go the other direction and just be presidential. So gone, for three days and counting, are the rallies in which he expressly asks people to re-elect him. Instead, voters see him in charge in the situation room, or addressing the country from the White House briefing room, or assuring the hurting while visiting the American Red Cross that “America is with you”.

To the independent and undecided voters sick of the mess in Washington, Obama appears bipartisan and positively unconcerned about his own political fate. His best friend is suddenly a prominent Romney supporter, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, with whom Obama inspected damage with yesterday.

“The president has been all over this,” Christie gushed in a TV interview.

The decision on when Obama will shift back from a heavy governing role to traditional campaigning is being driven by the White House, not the re-election campaign, aides say. Members of the tight inner circle of both operations appear content with the position Obama commands so far this week.

“The president is focused on exactly what the American people elected him to do, which is manage the country in the event of crisis,” said campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

“It is the kind of statement that leaves Romney little chance to counter, because there is no good political move in undermining American unity.”

On the flipside, even with a priority on safety and recovery for storm victims, the Obama camp’s underplaying of all things political seems a mighty stretch.

Obama has campaign stops scheduled in Nevada, Colorado and Ohio today.

They remain a go, for now, while Obama monitors the storm, and while voters monitor him, not campaigning, even as he is.