Or maybe it’s because there was something else in the works.

Around 9 p.m., as entertainment-seeking stragglers wandered into the few candlelit bars that remained stocked with ice and booze, the sounds of an accordion, bass drum, and even a sousaphone suddenly flooded the streets. The official Halloween bash may have been dumped but the Village Parade had gone back to its roots.

The 100 or so spirited freaks weren’t going to let a blackout get in the way of their Halloween festivities.

“We’re all artists and activists who go ahead and make things like this happen. We don’t need permits or permission from the city,” said one costumed woman from Brooklyn. Her friends had told her about the parade as she spent the day doing relief work in the Lower East Side. “We’ve got to keep the spirit alive,” she said. “People have been having a hard time lately and it’s just good to show that we have as much life and vitality as we always have. We’re survivors and we like parades.”

When she awoke Tuesday morning, Sikowitz still had not heard from him. She began calling his cellphone every 15 minutes, again and again and again. She then heard an unfamiliar man’s voice answer.

The man said he was a detective. Sikowitz told him that she was Jake Vogelman’s mother and that she was trying to reach him. The detective asked for her address.

“Just tell me my son is alive,” she said.

The detective again asked for her address. He arrived at her Park Slope home soon afterward. He showed her Jake’s driver’s license and she confirmed that was her son. The detective then informed her that Jake and a young female had been killed by a falling tree during the storm.

At the same time, the bromance allowed Obama to don the mantle of bipartisanship, project the image of a take-charge executive, and express empathy for storm victims—not a bad trifecta days before the election.

“I cannot thank the president enough for his personal concern and compassion,” Christie said in comments that seemed above and beyond the call of duty. Obama returned the praise.

Side by side in their navy windbreakers, the rotund Christie and the lean Obama looked very much the odd couple—and both seemed to revel in their cross-party partnership. All but forgotten is that Christie, who flirted with his own White House run this year, was Romney’s keynote speaker at the Tampa convention.

Republican strategists say Romney’s sidelining by the storm will prove to be a blip on the radar and that the challenger will have no difficulty returning to full campaign mode. The former governor, for his part, did not criticize the president by name on Wednesday, perhaps mindful of seeming overly harsh while television screens are still filled with pictures of devastation in New Jersey and New York.

Jane’s husband, prominent Brooklyn developer David Walentas—who effectively created what has become hip, mixed-use DUMBO out of what had been a manufacturing district—was charged with a key role in the 1980s with creating what became Brooklyn Bridge Park. The couple had long sought to place the carousel in the park, the signature green space in the neighborhood he largely owns, and in 2011 it arrived there, along with a $3.45 million gift to the park.

The 48 horses and four chariots that make up what’s now called Jane’s Carousel—after Walentas—brought delight to children at Idora Park in Youngstown, Ohio—then a prospering steel town—in 1922. After the city declined along with the steel industry in the 1970s, a fire consumed the park, but spared the historic carousel—in 1974, it became the first one ever listed on the National Register of Historic Places—which went up for auction in 1984.

The Walentases scooped up the bruised and battered carousel for $385,000, and it was shipped in parts to New York City in 1984, and the horses were stored for much of the next few years in individual stalls in the basement of David’s building at 45 Main Street.

Then Jane, a former art director for Estee Lauder, decided that no one was going to be able to restore the carousel with the kind of exactitude she wanted. If the prancing animals made by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company were to be brought back to their original splendor, decades of hackwork paint jobs had to be undone by hand—which is exactly what the Walentas did, with an X-Acto knife.

It’s rare to find anyone saying something positive about that budget agreement, which spawned the dreaded word “sequestration.” But the White House aides and Senate appropriators who hammered out the deal
deserve a round of applause for planning ahead and recognizing reality. After wild fires in Texas, tornadoes in Joplin, Mo., and Hurricane Irene drained FEMA down to its last $100 million, Republicans balked at spending more money for disaster relief unless it was paid for by cutting other spending, which Democrats refused to do.

The resulting stalemate was broken when Republicans backed off amid the negative publicity. But Democrats didn’t want to go through that again, and so what a Democratic aide refers to as “wiggle room” was created for disaster relief spending in the Budget Control Act. The details are convoluted, but the bottom line is that there is $5.4 billion in addition to FEMA’s $7.8 billion that Congress can tap to 20 assist rebuilding in New York and New Jersey without violating the budget caps Congress put in place.

It would take an act of Congress to free up that money, but President Obama would not be required to make a formal request. It would be up to Capitol Hill; with the money made available under the Budget Act, getting the votes shouldn’t be that heavy a lift. With disaster impact assessments in their early stages, lawmakers representing the hardest-hit region have not made the decision to take that next step. For the moment, FEMA is flush with cash, so any request would be later this year or early next, says a Democratic leadership aide.

He notes that the money if requested would be “spread around” depending on the needs. Some would likely go to FEMA to help homeowners rebuild, some to the Army Corps of Engineers for coastal shore rebuilding, and some to a new emergency fund created under the Budget Act at the Department of Transportation that could be used to repair New York subways.

“I’m homeless,” said Christa Cirl, who has lived in Sea Gate for 14 years and returned from an evacuation center Wednesday afternoon to find her house destroyed. Teary and shaking, Cirl said the minute she passed through the gate, “it was like World War III.” She lives alone, cell phone service is non-existent, and the only clothes she now has are packed into one small suitcase.

A few doors down, Jeff Nier was trying to figure out how to untangle the three-car pile-up in his driveway. The waves carried two cars from across the street and slammed them down onto his Ford Explorer. The ranch house opposite him was flattened. Nier, a roofer and a fishing boat captain, has lived in Sea Gate for 30 years and says he has never seen a storm like Sandy. But he’s not going anywhere. “I love being by the water.”

All along Atlantic Avenue, people were pumping water out of their basements, rinsing off muddy furniture, and firing up generators. Some were huddled together shaking their heads. Others just looked at the ocean in a daze. The smell of mold and mildew was pervasive.

A similar scene played out elsewhere in Coney Island, one of New York City’s most iconic neighborhoods, a place of hot-dog-eating contests and roller coasters, but also notorious housing projects and high crime rates.

Campaign, campaign, campaign. Get hoarse. Get tired. As I wrote in my cover piece, drop any hint of “I Got This” Obama and be hungry.

Second, pound away on this Romney lie about Jeep and China. One fact like this can grow to become symbolic of the whole Romney enterprise (as indeed it is!) if the Obama team chooses to make it so. When the heads of General Motors and Chrysler both in essence call a presidential candidate a liar, that’s pretty much without precedent in American politics, and it’s most definitely campaign commercial fodder. This is the kind of thing that makes for backyard fence chit chat, and it can stick like molasses.

Third, keep pumping up the gender gap right until the end. Considering a range of polls, the gender gap was very wide before that first debate, 15 points or more. Then it narrowed to almost nothing or, in some polls, nothing. Now it’s back up to eight or 10 or 12, depending on the state. Obama beat John McCain among women by 13 points last time, according to exit polls. He should hit at least that, with all the fodder out there, from Romney’s own vow to defund Planned Parenthood to all these nutso Republican Senate and House candidates and their 16th-century comments about women’s bodies. Romney’s positions have been considerably more reactionary than McCain’s were—on Planned Parenthood, on contraception generally—so he deserves a worse fate.

Fourth, I’d like to see the Colin Powell and Susan Eisenhower endorsements used in ads aimed at independent voters. I don’t know who’s undecided at this point. And they may not even persuade anybody, although I do think Powell swung some votes. But they’re semi-surprise validators who aren’t elected Democrats and are enrolled Republicans. Hearing from them just makes independents feel a little better about their vote. It even makes most Democrats feel better about their vote.

According to the ratings agency Fitch, these claims can also be triggered if a “civil authority” prevents people from going into a certain area. With the mandatory evacuations up and down the Jersey Shore and low-lying areas of Manhattan, including much of Lower Manhattan, the financial center of the world, there is every reason to expect real losses followed by real payouts.

Whether insured or not, the disruptions are indicative of real damage and real costs to the economy. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote on Wednesday that Sandy was sure to be one of the 10 most costly natural disasters. Robert DiUbaldo and other insurance experts put the likely combined cost at less than the damage done by Katrina, which caused just over $157 billion in damage and loss of economic output, but above last year’s Hurricane Irene, which caused $12.6 billion in combined damage. Hurricane Andrew, which devastated Miami in 1992, was the second costliest hurricane ever, cost the country $13.1 billion in lost output and $41.3  billion in damages, according to Moody’s. While devastating, Sandy is not likely to cripple the insurance or reinsurance industries with massive payouts.  

As for the overall economic impact, there is some dispute. There’s no question that Sandy is sandbagging economic activity around the country. Since Saturday, according to Flightstats, 19,574 flights have been cancelled in the U.S. due largely to the storm. The machinery of home sales, mortgage financings, and stock trading has ground to a halt. Halloween, which injects a huge amount of cash into local economies, was essentially cancelled.

On Tuesday, economists at IHS Global Insight, a consulting firm, wrote that “the effect on growth for the fourth quarter will not be catastrophic but might still be noticeable, especially in an economy with little momentum anyway.” Much of the economic activity—cancelled plane flights, deferred retail purchases—that didn’t take place in October due to Sandy will likely take place in November or December. But not all of it will. “Suppose that the affected regions lose just 25 percent of their overall output for two days that is not recoverable later,” HIS writes. “That would knock about $25 billion annualized ($6 billion actual) off GDP, and could take as much as 0.6 percentage points off annualized fourth-quarter real GDP growth rate.” Given that the economy is growing at an annualized rate of about two percent, that would make Sandy a significant drag on the economy.

Things have changed.

On Monday, the construction crane that runs up that building collapsed and became the visual symbol of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Yesterday, China Daily reported that the collapse of the boom on the crane “may unnerve some Chinese buyers.” It’s not nice to wish ill on others, but I bet they’re consulting lawyers and not feng shui experts right now. Competing condo developer Donald Trump promptly snapped a photo of the crane from his apartment and tweeted it with a cackling comment about the incompetence of the One57 team, which consists of the construction company Lend Lease and the building’s owner/developer, Extell and its president Gary Barnett.

You don’t have to be a fan of the Donald, or an advocate of schadenfreude, to get the message conveyed by that photo. Drooping next to Extell’s huge erection, the crane looks like a bad omen. It’s Gary Barnett’s flaccid, dangling boom of doom.

I was engrossed in writing on Monday when my wife, who was working at home in anticipation of Sandy’s arrival, called to me from our living room. “You better look at this,” she said. The last time she said those words, we were packing for a trip to Egypt as television beamed images of a revolution brewing in Tahrir Square. That time, we wound up at Round Hill in Jamaica. This time we wound up refugees, but that’s getting ahead of the story.