Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

On a day when millions of Americans face serious hardship as they recover from Hurricane Sandy’s damage, Mitt Romney clearly decided it would be crass to campaign in a conventional way. So he turned a scheduled rally in Kettering, Ohio, this morning into a “storm relief event,” and posed before piles of donated canned goods.

“We’re going to box these things up in just a minute and put them on some trucks, and then we’re going to send them into, I think it’s New Jersey,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “There’s a site we’ve identified where we can take these goods and distribute them to people who need them.”

He described such donations as “the American way,” and there’s no doubt that dropping off a few cans of Campbell’s tomato soup makes people feel as if they’re contributing.



But the real “American way” is quite different. Most disaster agencies don’t want donated goods; they need cash. And in the modern era, the most important cash comes from taking people’s tax dollars and distributing them in the form of federal aid to communities hard-hit by a disaster. Because that involves the federal government, it is tainted in the minds of Mr. Romney and his party. It is compulsory, and thus not an offering of the heart.

As our editorial noted this morning, Mr. Romney wants to end centralized emergency relief and let states handle the load themselves, though few states can do so without federal assistance. In any event, storms, as we have seen time and time again, cross state lines. (Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose state may have been the hardest hit by the storm, was effusive in thanking President Obama for assistance today, drawing criticism from Republicans who are more interested in politics than recovery.)

Mr. Romney’s rash promise to put a hard ceiling on discretionary spending – which includes emergency response – would mean far less money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The House budgets developed by his running mate, Paul Ryan, would cut this kind of spending even further, an idea that Mr. Romney considers “excellent.”

Mr. Romney ignored all questions this morning about his plans for federal emergency management. It’s probably embarrassing to admit those plans consist largely of collecting soup cans.

This blog post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 30, 2012

This blog post originally misspelled the name of the town where Mitt Romney held a disaster relief rally. It’s Kettering, not Kittering.