Romney's Hurricane Sandy relief efforts met with skepticism
theGRIO REPORT - The Romney campaign's decision Tuesday to suddenly change a scheduled victory rally in Ohio into a storm-relief event in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is being criticized by pundits as a staged photo opportunity...
The list of mishaps during what was supposed to be a depoliticized event started with the accidental showing of a 10-minute biographical video on Romney, the same one that played at the Republican National Convention. And before then, reporters were given press badges that said “victory rally” because a new batch couldn’t be printed in time.
The sense of a staged event followed all the way to the donation line. Buzzfeed reported:
As supporters lined up to greet the candidate, a young volunteer in a Romney/Ryan T-shirt stood near the tables, his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting, “You need a donation to get in line!”
Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, “What if we dropped off our donations up front?”
The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. “Just grab something,” he said.
Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their “donations” to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest “Thank you.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was unsparing in her criticism of the governor.
“This is not a plot in a sitcom about how to run for president,” the host of The Rachel Maddow Show said on her show Wednesday. “This is a real disaster, an ongoing one, affecting millions of Americans.”
She continued, “And real help really is needed, and that is not the same thing as using the suffering of millions of Americans as an occasion to accrue political capital for yourself by trying to create the appearance that you are helping when you are not bothering to actually try to really help.”
The question of how helpful food donations are is up for debate, but the American Red Cross has stressed that it would only like monetary or blood donations for Hurricane Sandy relief. Some organizations find the logistics involved in sorting through donations and distributing them to be less effective and a hindrance to relief.
Regardless, people in attendance found the event to be a good effort on the part of the Romney campaign.
One resident, Paulette Flaum, told The New York Times that though she’d long been skeptical of Romney, his decision to hold a storm-relief event showed he was “a generous man.”
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