OpinionObama gains an edge in presidential race amid New York storm fallout
With the election less than a week away, it's a chance for the president to show leadership in a crisis. Mitt Romney has a harder task
The questions are stacking up like storm debris along the Hudson River in New York.
What impact will superstorm Sandy - the biggest storm in US history and potentially its most costly - have on the presidential election, now less than a week away?
Will it hurt President Barack Obama's bid for a second term, scuppering his drive to nudge Democrat voters towards casting early votes? Or is his Republican rival Mitt Romney the one it will wound, thwarting his vaunted post-election momentum? For the moment, at least, it seems to be advantage Obama.
No one is pretending such questions are pretty at a time of crisis, but they nonetheless reflect the hard realities of a most political moment.
Just as Sandy made landfall, polls nationwide and in key swing states were revealing a race tightening to deadlock. But no other natural disaster has threatened to have an impact on an election in such a fashion.
Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey - the state that bore the brunt of the storm - was in no mood for such issues as he battled to lead local recovery efforts. In typically robust style, he said he "couldn't give a damn less about election day".