Romney faces tough balancing act in storm's wake

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney edged back into active campaigning in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, confronting the awkward challenge of keeping up momentum a week before Election Day without appearing callous about the devastation.

While the mammoth storm that ravaged the U.S. East Coast jolted the campaigns of both candidates, it presented a tougher problem for the Republican.

President Barack Obama canceled his campaign appearances at least through Wednesday but is staying in the public eye as commander of federal relief efforts. He visited the American Red Cross headquarters on Tuesday and travels to New Jersey on Wednesday to view damage and comfort people recovering from the storm. The president even received rare praise from Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, a Romney supporter, for his management of the disaster.

"It stops the campaign more or less dead in its tracks," said Republican pollster and strategist Mike McKenna, who doesn't work for the Romney campaign. "A pause always helps the guys on defense. It helps the Obama guys catch their breath a little bit and think about what to do next."

McKenna says Romney shouldn't take much time off and should instead focus on key states outside the storm zone.

"Start off with a prayer for the people in New York and New Jersey, definitely do that, but don't stop attacking. Try to keep your momentum through this," McKenna said.

Romney wavered in his strategy. First the campaign said he would skip a rally in Ohio on Tuesday out of sympathy for the storm victims. Then Romney decided to do the event but recast it as a storm-relief effort, shorn of the usual campaign speech.

"It's part of the American spirit, the American way, to give to people in need," Romney told supporters in Kettering, Ohio, before they lined up to hand him bags of canned food for storm victims.

Romney planned three campaign events in Florida on Wednesday, trying not to lose momentum in his push to move ahead in the few tight state races expected to decide the election. The U.S. president is chosen not by the nationwide popular vote but in state-by-state contests. That has made a handful of states whose voters are neither reliably Republican nor Democratic the focus of the Nov. 6 election, expected to be one of the closest in U.S. history. Ohio and Florida are prominent among those.

Adding to his dilemma are Romney's previous statements on the federal government's role in emergency management. He said he believes state and local governments should have primary responsibility for emergency cleanup, and refused Tuesday to answer repeated questions from reporters about how he would run the Federal Emergency Management Agency if he wins the election.

Asked about federal aid to help recover and rebuild from Sandy, Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said: "A Romney-Ryan administration will always ensure that disaster funding is there for those in need. Period."

For Obama, missing a few days of active campaigning for vital presidential duties may be a good trade, politically speaking.

Lingering anger about the previous president's performance when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans provides a backdrop that will benefit Obama if his administration does a solid job, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

She said a natural disaster gives a sitting president "unlimited access to the media to say things the public wants and needs to hear in a fashion that reinforces that he is president."

For Obama, the federal response to the natural disaster could make or break his bid for a second term. His reputation could suffer if the federal government's response is feeble or botched.

With Election Day a week away, however, there may be little time to make such assessments. And there is a risk of appearing to politicize tragedy if Romney speaks up too soon — a complaint that Democrats lodged against him when a U.S. Consulate in Libya was attacked.

"Criticism could boomerang if it appears to be ginned up to win votes in the election as opposed to genuine concern that people were not protected or people were not helped," said Mitchell McKinney, a professor of political communication at the University of Missouri.

On the airwaves, the race for the White House was hardly on hold.

Romney plunged into traditionally Democratic-leaning Minnesota and Pennsylvania, pouring money into television ads in the states, a strategy that forced Obama to defend his own turf.

The Republican efforts could indicate that Romney is desperately searching for a last-minute path to victory without all-important Ohio, where polls show Obama has a slight edge. Or it could mean just the opposite, that Romney's so confident in the most competitive battlegrounds that he's pressing for insurance against Obama in what's expected to be a close race.

Or perhaps the Republican simply has money to burn. Use it now or never.

"It's not really desperation" that drives such decisions, said McKenna. "You think, 'Maybe I can make the other guy spend some money there,'" even if the state is probably out of reach.