A good number of the past American presidential elections have left something memorable such as being the first televised campaigns in 1960 and the 2000 disappointing polls that needed another vote from the Supreme Court to decide the winner. The 2008 presidential election likewise broke the record for bringing in the first black man into the White House.
This year’s presidential election, unfortunately, will be remembered more for a killer storm that left tens of Americans dead just a week before polling day. Hurricane Sandy, which shook the whole of the northeast coastline of the United States on Monday and Tuesday, is the one to blame. It was a powerful storm that surpassed the expectations of the weather forecasters, the authorities and the populace. It hit hard.
Frankly, had this hurricane hit an area like the East African coast, the world would have not believed what would have befallen the people of the most beautiful tourist region on the continent. In the Caribbean this very hurricane didn’t make landfall on shore, but still its resulting rainfall killed more than 70 people. Surely Americans did their best to avert the worst, but still the devastation is of an unimaginable magnitude.
The presidential campaigns which had reached their peak had to be halted, but technically President Barack Obama had an advantage as he got an exclusive opportunity to demonstrate extraordinary leadership at a crucial time, and he did it better than any other president in recent memory. Americans still remember how poorly George Bush handled Hurricane Katrina that killed 1,836 in August 2005.
The Republican governor of hardest hit New Jersey, Chris Christie, changed his tough rhetoric against the Democratic candidate, President Obama, after touring the state with Obama in the presidential Marine One helicopter. When asked by the press he said: “Obama’s response was outstanding.” Greek philosopher Aristotle once noted: “Man, by his nature, is a political animal,” surely the monster storm may have boosted Obama a bit.
The Mayor of New York City, modest billionaire Michael Bloomberg, was contemplating asking for the National Guard, the equivalent of National Service in Tanzania, to help firefighters in rescue operations and the police in protecting the metropolis inhabited by more than 25 million people, a third of them in Manhattan alone.
Falling trees were mainly to blame for the deaths of people who had remained in their residences while others drowned inside their houses and others stepped on live electrical cables. To make matters worse a huge fire gutted 80 houses in the Breezy Point area of New York leaving owners poorer than at any other time in their lives.
As is the case in almost all disasters around the world, looters are having the best week in New York stealing everything from basic food stuffs to expensive electronic items such as laptops from abandoned homes, shops, and offices. The thugs are even posting their evils on Twitter, one of them saying: “I scored a laptop. It’s easy just reach out and grab it”.
Police have arrested a couple of thugs, but it won’t be easy to prevent looting in the nation’s largest city. The problem is that hundreds of thousands of people had vacated it since the weekend leaving everything in the hands of risk-taking thieves who care less about going to jail.
Sadly, the world-famous New York Marathon will have to take place on Sunday anyway, the race that, Juma Ikangaa, the then marathon superstar of Tanzania, won in 1989. The contingent of 50,000 runners of the Sunday race will have a moment to witness the devastation although electrical power and many services will still be a big problem in the downtown New York area.
The initial estimates for the huge loss were put at around $50 billion excluding the estimated $12 billion needed to clean up the debris. In the end the loss could beat the $81 billion that Katrina cost Americans. With the global financial headquarters badly affected, the trickledown effect of the catastrophic natural disaster could impact the struggling economy of the entire globe in the coming months.
Before Mother Nature hit the eastern shores of the US, opinion polls showed Obama and his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, in a neck-to-neck situation with Obama pulling slightly ahead in the electoral vote. The US president is elected by Electoral College votes, not the popular vote, and the winner needs 270 votes.
The biggest lesson for African countries is simple: Americans don’t rig elections and in fact early voting had already started before Hurricane Sandy hit. To what extent will this deadly storm turn tables is hard to tell, but Obama is likely to win by a slim margin on November 6. Whoever wins, one thing for sure is: Americans will never forget this election |
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