President Obama cancelled his campaign events, while Mitt Romney pressed on. | AP Photos How to campaign after a disaster

With less than a week to go before Election Day, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney face one of the trickiest tasks in politics: campaigning in a disaster’s wake.

At least 10 people are dead in New York City, flood waters have devastated communities up and down the East Coast, and hundreds of thousands of people are without power. It’s not an opportune time for presidential candidates to quibble over small issues or engage in the name-calling that has defined the 2012 campaign.


( PHOTOS: Hurricane Sandy)

Obama has canceled his campaign events through Wednesday, when he will tour hard-hit New Jersey with Gov. Chris Christie, a top Romney surrogate who has been effusive in his praise of Obama and the federal government’s storm response. Romney pressed forward Tuesday with a storm-related appearance in Dayton, Ohio. And as long as the storm dominates the news, both candidates will remain in a state of suspended animation, each waiting for the Sandy pause to pass before making their final campaign push.

Here’s what to watch as Obama and Romney transition through the familiar steps of empathy, assistance and back to full-throated campaigning.

1. When to go negative

The trickiest question coming out of a campaign-season disaster is when the public will tolerate traditional political attacks.

( Also on POLITICO: Sandy shakes up campaign calendar)

Neither campaign has pulled any of their advertising in swing states inside or outside Sandy’s path. The Obama campaign released a new attack ad in Ohio Monday saying Romney is lying in his claims that Chrysler is outsourcing jobs to China. Romney’s campaign debuted a fresh ad Tuesday called “Crushed By Your Policies.”

But Obama returned to his day job Monday, and Romney put aside his sharpest attacks on the president from the stump. On Tuesday, Obama again canceled his campaign appearances, and Romney rebranded his as a relief effort.

When the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks froze the New York City mayoral election, primary polls there had been open for three hours. Votes cast that day were voided and when the primary rescheduled for two weeks later, there was no playbook for when to go back to stumping against the other guy.

( Also on POLITICO: Sandy forces anti-politics politics)

“There’s no data or protocol book since this almost never happens,” said Mark Green, then the city’s public advocate who won the Democratic primary for mayor before losing the general election to Michael Bloomberg. “Consequently, it all turns on the antennae of the candidate and his staff about what’s the right time or what’s the right tone.”

For Green, that meant no campaigning at all for the week after the attacks. When he started up again, it was with a “unite to rebuild” theme. By the time he entered a post-primary run-off, the election season was back to normal, with race-based attacks flying between Green and Fernando Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president.

( PHOTOS: Politicians take action on Sandy)

Green won but looked weak during the general election when he accepted the idea that Rudy Giuliani be allowed to stay in office an extra three months. Bloomberg, meanwhile, began stressing his experience running large companies and vowed to keep Manhattan’s jobs in the city at a time when it appeared businesses would flee.

“The dynamic, the rationale for each of the candidacies of Green and Bloomberg were changed by 9/11,” said Bill Cunningham, Bloomberg’s 2001 campaign spokesman.

2. No time to think

Political responses to disasters are as much about instinct as science.

When 12 people were killed in a Colorado movie theater early on a Friday morning in July, Obama and Romney each shifted from campaigning to mourning, canceling some events and turning others into expressions of public grief. They took down negative ads in Colorado for the weekend.

By Monday, Obama campaign senior adviser David Axelrod was back to slamming Romney via Twitter, the signal the campaign had returned to normal.

With a week left in election 2012, there’s little time for campaigns to poll or focus group their way through the storm’s aftermath. John McCain learned that the hard way during his fumbled response to the 2008 financial crisis. More recently, Romney was criticized for slamming Obama over the attacks on the Benghazi Consulate before learning that Ambassador Chris Stevens had been killed.

Sometimes public disapproval of a politician’s reaction hardens over time. After Hurricane Katrina, which didn’t come during an election cycle, it took several days for the image of an incompetent, uncaring Bush administration to cement in many voters’ minds.

“You don’t have anything like two weeks to take a hiatus in campaigning in the presidential race,” Cunningham said. “It’s a real wild card. It’s a real guess who will vote, who won’t vote. There’s a lot of questions that we won’t know the answer to until we see the impact of the storm.”

Obama has canceled three days of campaign events. When he visits New Jersey Wednesday to see the damage for himself and to reassure residents that Washington is there to help, he will dominate another day of news coverage in a campaign with precious few remaining.

Also bad for Romney: The political stars of Sandy so far are Bloomberg and Christie, who has gone out of his way to praise Obama and the federal response to the storm.

3) Look busy

Hurricane Sandy marks the third time in the 2012 general election campaign that Obama and Romney have been forced to detour from the campaign trail because of outside circumstances. After the Colorado theater shooting, Hurricane Isaac slammed into New Orleans and Mississippi during the Republican National Convention.

Both events underscored Obama’s incumbency advantage. He could sweep into town with resources in tow, mobilize the federal government’s response and offer comforting words for the victims. Romney arrived in both Louisiana and Colorado with nothing to offer beyond encouraging words.

In the aftermath of Sandy, there is again nothing Romney can do to help areas impacted by the storm.

But he needs to be seen doing something, to avoid ceding the entire disaster media narrative to Obama. Romney chipped away at Obama’s edge in New Orleans by arriving there first for a tour with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, but his awkward interactions with stranded residents received as much attention as the visit itself.

After Hurricane Andrew slammed South Florida in August 1992, Bill Clinton — then the Arkansas governor with no jurisdiction over Miami or Homestead, Fla. — visited shortly after President George H.W. Bush and reinforced his I-feel-your-pain narrative in a way the patrician president did not.

Clinton still lost Florida to Bush in 1992 — but he won the election.

“Romney has two problems: He has nothing really to do” and “Will this interrupt his momentum?” said Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s spokeswoman in 1992.

Romney held what his campaign dubbed a “storm relief event” in Dayton Tuesday morning, but he risks sparking criticism that it was really a campaign appearance.

John Weaver, who ran GOP rival Jon Huntsman’s primary campaign, took to Twitter to weigh in on Romney’s Ohio stop.

“The campaigns should suspend tomorrow as well,” he wrote Monday night. “And cancel these ‘storm relief collection’ events in swing states. C’mon.”

4) No one knows anything

There is simply no precedent for a major disaster upending a national campaign a week before Election Day.

The closest comparison may be the Cuban Missile Crisis, which began three weeks before the 1962 midterm elections. President John F. Kennedy’s Democratic Party won seats in the Senate and lost them in the House.

But those races were 50 years ago — long before cable news and Twitter echo chambers.

“There’s no computer model for forecasting this,” Myers said. “You can forecast the path of the storm, but you can’t forecast the path that politics will take in its wake.”

With Obama leading the federal response from the White House, his campaign team on the ground is left to plan for events that common sense dictates won’t take place. His Ohio staff was distributing tickets to Wednesday rallies in Cincinnati and Akron — now canceled — as late as Monday evening.

Not to mention the wild card of how the public interprets the federal and local response to the storm. Less than 24 hours since the storm began lashing the East Coast, it remains unknown which, if any, politicians will win praise or scorn for their response.

“I don’t know that you’re going to be able to know,” said Florida GOP strategist Rick Wilson, himself a veteran of several hurricanes. “By Election Day are voters going to be able to make a judgment on, ‘Did FEMA screw up or not screw up?’ I don’t think we’ll be able to know.”

Even though Obama claimed Monday that he is “not worried” about the storm’s impact on the election and Romney ignored political questions from reporters Tuesday at his Dayton event, both men remain keenly focused on their campaigns.

“With under a week to go, everything is [the] campaign, no matter what you call it,” a Romney adviser said.

5) There’s no storm damage in Florida and Iowa

Whenever a disaster hits, politicians tell us that Americans come together in times of crisis. And it’s true that the Red Cross and other relief organizations will be busy during the next week.

But Americans have short memories and tend to focus on their immediate surroundings. The most severe damage appears to be in states that are not in play in the presidential race, though North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire took peripheral hits. Ohio has tens of thousands without power but appears to have escaped the worst damage.

Obama and Romney have dispatched their No. 2s and top surrogates to campaign outside the storm’s path. Clinton will make stops in Minnesota and Colorado Tuesday. Vice President Joe Biden will visit Florida Wednesday and Wisconsin Friday. Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, will be in Wisconsin for “storm relief efforts” Tuesday and campaign events Wednesday.

Romney himself will make three stops for rallies in Florida on Wednesday.

There are also hard-fought Senate races continuing across the country as well as college and pro football games that will be played this weekend — an NFL tilt took place Monday night in Arizona.

Wednesday is Halloween, and governor’s mansions across the country will hand out candy. Christie said on Twitter that he would “sign an executive order rescheduling Halloween.” The White House has not said whether the annual candy giveaway there will carry on as scheduled.

“Have you noticed how long America’s attention span is for anything?” Wilson said. “Even in times of unspeakable tragedy, the rest of America rolls on. This is a terrible tragedy, but it is not 9/11. It is not at a point where it is going to disrupt all the other pressing things going on in people’s lives.”