Hurricane Sandy has just about made landfall; many tunnels and bridges into New York are closed, a crane has collapsed high above 57th Street and the talking heads are going crazy, “as we approach full moon full high tide.”

Hurricane Sandy coming ashore

It is a literal hurricane of images and chatter – and by literal, I mean figurative. Lots of breaking stories, tight-faced warnings and on-the-spot reporters losing their balance in the wind. The best of them has to be Lonnie Quinn of CBS 2 News in New York.

Lonnie Quinn looking presidential.

Lonnie Quinn not only has all the maps and graphs, but more importantly he talks in common folk speech. Sleeves rolled, tie undone, Lonnie offers clear and confident opinions with a genuine enthusiasm (“Look at the wind field on that!”); he is what many might call literally (figuratively) presidential.

Lonnie explains things to Maurice and Kristine

Now if Mitt Romney is looking for a way to surge those swing states, he should dump Paul Ryan and get Lonnie on the ticket instead. (Or if he were really serious about this, he could ask Lonnie to supplant himself!) Yeah, like any of that will happen…as Laetitia Sadier sings in Stereolab’s The Seeming and the Meaning: We communicate more and more/ In more defined ways than ever before/ But no one was got anything to say/ It’s all very poor it’s all just a bore.