The October Surprise is here, and her name is Sandy

The presidential candidates had big plans for this week. A hurricane is raining on their parade

Paul Brandus

Despite our sense of self-importance, Hurricane Sandy — just like massive wildfires, record-setting droughts, devastating floods, and terrifying earthquakes — has once again shown, as Timothy Egan of The New York Times so deliciously put it several months ago, that Mother Nature makes a mockery of our vanity.

And so it is again, this time with perhaps the biggest, most ominous storm to ever descend upon the East Coast — the entire East Coast. It is a storm said to be so threatening that it has shut down our largest city and our nation's capital, and forced the most powerful man in the world, and the man who wishes to be, to humbly rearrange their schedules, with their election day showdown just eight days away.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Paul Brandus

An award-winning member of the White House press corps, Paul Brandus founded WestWingReports.com (@WestWingReport) and provides reports for media outlets around the United States and overseas. His career spans network television, Wall Street, and several years as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow, where he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union for NBC Radio and the award-winning business and economics program Marketplace. He has traveled to 53 countries on five continents and has reported from, among other places, Iraq, Chechnya, China, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.