ST. PAUL, Minn., Aug. 31 -- Three years after it battered New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina upended this convention city Sunday.
For John McCain, struggling to separate himself from the worst of President Bush's record and to get out from under the weight of his unpopular party, this week was supposed to be about emerging as his own candidate. His selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate energized the Republican Party's conservative base and the candidate himself, setting up a convention week designed to discredit Democratic nominee Barack Obama and boost McCain as an independent-minded reformer ready to shake up Washington.
Discredit? Your bias is already showing. "Watch him self-destruct" is more like it.
Now a storm called Gustav threatens to remind voters of perhaps the signal event that helped turn them against the GOP - the Bush administration's botched response to the devastating 2005 storm. What neither McCain nor the party can tolerate now is anything that smacks of insensitivity or incompetence in the face of another potential natural disaster. As he told NBC anchor Brian Williams on Sunday, the opening of the convention "has got to be Americans helping Americans. America first."Waitaminute! Wouldn't that be 'change'?
Gustav has disrupted McCain's convention, but the storm also presents the candidate with an opportunity to show that he would be a different kind of president than Bush. His decisions to fly to Mississippi on Sunday for a pre-storm assessment and then to radically redraw the agenda for the convention's opening night until it is clear what might happen with the storm send a message that some top Republicans believe will serve him well in the campaign ahead against Obama.
He might even surprise the WaPo.
"McCain has shown exactly the right values in putting America ahead of the Republican Party," said former House speaker Newt Gingrich. "This is a very dangerous situation for thousands of people and for the country, and it is vital that McCain keep focused on the country. So far he has done exactly the right things."
Where does Gingrich fit into a McCain White House?
Bush and the Republicans have never recovered from Katrina.
Nagin, however, showed genius this time, using the busses.
The president's approval ratings, already sinking under public dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq through the summer of 2005, plunged further after Katrina. His halting reaction - and even worse, the woeful performance of federal disaster agencies and his widely ridiculed remark to then-FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" - left an indelible mark on his presidency and his party. The Republican brand is at its lowest point in years.
So loyalty is over-rated, anyway.
Everything here in St. Paul is now on hold until the storm hits and the damage is assessed. Normally, a political convention is the most scripted of events, a four-day infomercial for the nominee. No one has a script for what the Republicans are dealing with now. They announced Sunday that they would dramatically shorten the opening-day schedule, stripping out political speeches and doing essential business, but out of the glare of television's prime-time hours. Beyond that, it is anybody's guess what kind of show they will be able to present.
There'll still be time for a Greek spectacle later in the week.
For now, Gustav has denied McCain and the Republicans the kind of platform that Obama and the Democrats enjoyed in Denver last week. "Gustav is making this a very different, even unique, convention," said Ben Ginsberg, a Republican strategist and former party official. "It calls for something appropriate in this situation, which is not drama and spectacle."
I'm betting McCain will find a way to turn this to his advantage.
Gustav will disrupt the Democrats as well. Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), will be forced to adjust their own campaign plans to account for the storm. Balance alert:
McCain has moved quicker on that front, but the Democrats will certainly adapt.