BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — As the East Coast began to come back to life on Tuesday following Sandy’s wrathful rampage, the brief respite from electoral politics came to an abrupt end. While President Barack Obama struggled to deal with the aftermath of one of the country’s worst natural disasters in history, his Republican challenger was confronting the ghosts of his own political past.

BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — With all the money, time and effort the two major candidates have expended in this interminable presidential election campaign, they forgot to lobby the one voter who really counts right about now: Mother Nature. Hurricane Sandy has targeted the Eastern seaboard, disrupting the campaign, suspending early voting and threatening massive and extended power outages.