President Obama visited the Jersey shore Wednesday with Governor Chris Christie to get an up-close look at storm-damaged coastline. But a day earlier, Mitt Romney was already doing his part in Kettering, Ohio, at a campaign rally-turned fake disaster-relief event.

And to buff his own image as a disaster-relief specialist, Romney compared the Sandy relief effort to … his experience cleaning up the field after a high-school football game. Seriously.

I remember once we had a football field at my high school. The field was covered with rubbish and paper goods from people who’d had a big celebration there at the game. And there was a group of us there assigned to clean it up. And I thought, ‘how are we going to clean up all the mess on this football field?’ There were just a few of us. And the person responsible for organizing the effort said, ‘Just line up along the yard lines. You go between the goal line and the 10-yard line, and the next person between the 10 and 20, and just walk down and do your lane. And if everybody cleans their lanes, we’ll get it done.’ And so today, we’re cleaning one lane if you will.



msnbc’s Lawrence O’Donnell wasn’t buying it. In his Rewrite segment on Wednesday’s edition of The Last Word, he did a play-by-play on what he called the Romney campaign’s “fake” storm relief event.

“Because the desperate and shameless Romney campaign believes it cannot win the election without winning Ohio, Team Romney pushed their candidate out on a stage in Ohio yesterday,” O’Donnell explained. “Because the storm was still in progress in some states and the death count was climbing in New York and elsewhere, traditional political decency dictated that Mitt Romney be not caught campaigning yesterday.”

Buzzfeed also reported Romney campaign staffers stocked up beforehand on $5,000-worth of canned foods and other essentials at a Wal-Mart the night before – “to put on display while they waited for donations to come in.”

O’Donnell suggested these measures are the result of an extreme situation less than one week before the election: “It’s hard out there for a presidential candidate who is utterly irrelevant to the massive relief effort President Obama is running in the aftermath of this week’s historic storm.”