843: A Little Bit of Power
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Maybe you saw this video this past week. A veteran meteorologist in Florida, John Morales, on live TV, talking about the power of Hurricane Milton as it was still approaching the state. He was reading the barometric pressure numbers. He just got to him. He choked up. It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific. He wasn't the only meteorologist who seemed pushed to the limits, trying to communicate the scale and intensity of Hurricane Milton. Noah Bergren, who's on TV in Orlando, declared in a tweet, "This is nothing short of astronomical. I'm at a loss for words to meteorologically describe to you the storms' small eye and intensity. This is now the fourth strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world." He would have corrected that to the fifth strongest. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over the ocean water can produce. Reading that, to get the feeling of somebody trying their hardest, to summon words that would do the job to fully warn people, evacuate, get to safety. Meeting circumstance put these meteorologists into a situation where they could use the little bit of power they have to try to reward people and hopefully save lives. That kind of thing, where somebody has a small amount of power and then something happens, some moment arrives, where they really can make a difference, it sometimes happens in politics. And when it does, somebody who is not usually in the limelight, somebody who's not a household name, can end up with a men's power. Men shake out so that random political figures suddenly have the entire weight of a country's future in their hands. Classic example, I think of Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State in Georgia, who famously got a phone call from then President Trump, asking him after the last presidential election to find some votes or throw out some votes just to somehow overturn the results in Georgia. So look, all I want to do is this, I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, and flipping the state is a great testament to our country. Raffensperger, of course, refused. There was another example like that a couple of weeks ago. Nebraska lawmakers were debating whether to switch the way Nebraska gives out its electoral college votes in presidential elections. Nebraska doesn't use the winner-take-all system that most of the states use, which means that it's possible that Kamala Harris could win one electoral college vote from Nebraska, which conceivably could decide the coming election. In fact, that is such a real possibility in this very close election that Donald Trump personally got on the phone to convince lawmakers to make the change. And in the end, it all came down to one state senator, Mike McDonald, a Republican actually, who dug in his heels and said no, and ended up, it felt like, in every newspaper and news broadcast in the country. This idea of changing it with 42 days, it's like we're in a football game, we call it
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