I've been looking at some of the pictures and scanning some of the stories about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the northeast. President Obama showed up, had his picture taken with a concerned expression on his face, hugged a few people, then went off to try to win re-election. That's not intended as a criticism of Obama; that's what politicians do. In the face of natural disastars, it's about all they can do.
President Bush was crucified mercilessly for the governmental failures after Hurricane Katrina. The situation is just as bad, if not worse, with Sandy. The fact that government has been so inept is not Bush's or Obama's fault; government, by its very nature, is simply incapable of dealing with such matters. National government is the nationalization of force; as the American Founders well realized, government's sole purpose is the protection of individual rights (property rights). It is the only thing government can do well. It is simply not designed, inherently, to do benevolent work, redistribute income without creating dependence, "invest" in business, stop the rise of oceans, change the weather, etc. etc. etc. America's wise founders understood that, and deliberately omitted, from the Constitution, any power for government to do benevolent work. The only real failure of government in the Katrina--and now Sandy--disasters is in leading people to believe that government can effectively deal with these catastrophes and has a responsibility to do so. No, and no. History, reason, and common sense all oppose that. But, the American people do not study history any more, and tragically, reason and common sense are in short supply among nearly every class of citizen.
Neither political party has the personnel, on the national or local level, to solve this problem. My dear brother, thoroughly frustrated, told me he is going to vote for a third party candidate this year, and that is certainly his right to do so, more power to him. But that's not the answer, either. The problem is not the politicians, the problem is the people who elect them in the first place. And until there is a virtuous, self-disciplined revival among the mass of American people, until the citizens of the country start accepting responsibility for their own lives and actions, begin taking care of themselves, and stop asking government to do it for them--something government is wholly unequipped to do--the problem will never be solved. And that revival isn't going to happen because one of the major principles of liberalism (embodied by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in particular) is to prevent that very thing from happening.