After the first debate, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was on a steady rise toward Election Day. However, last week’s events surrounding Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in the northeast seemed to have broken that climb according to former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Barbour explained his hypothesis behind this disruption, suggesting it took the media focus away from Obama and put it on storm devastation.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think what Obama did helped him a bit,” Barbour said. “What happened is the news media absolutely blacked out any of the issues that have been the issues of this campaign. If this election was held last Friday, the last Friday in October, Romney would have won. If it had been the last Friday in September, Obama would have won […] Nothing was stopping Romney’s momentum, no matter what Obama did, he couldn’t have stopped the momentum.”
“All the news coverage was about everything but Obama’s policies and the results of those policies,” said Barbour.
Karl Rove expressed a similar opinion last week in a Washington Post article. “If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” Rove told WaPo. “There was a stutter in the campaign.”