The Republican Party severely curtailed the start yesterday of its convention to nominate Senator John McCain for president as Hurricane Gustav bore down on the US.
Stalked by memories of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, McCain shelved most of the convention’s opening day. US President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney canceled plans to attend to concentrate on the deadly storm.
Party leaders scurried to change their plans amid fears at being seen to stage a political celebration while a killer storm pummels the Louisiana coast.
PHOTO: AP
“The challenges are grave and we have to, as you know, put our country first,” McCain said at a rally in O’Fallon, Missouri, late on Sunday.
“We will put aside our political hats and put on our American hats and we will do everything America needs to do and America must do because the nature of our nation is to help any of us,” he said.
McCain’s Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama said he would make his campaign’s mammoth donor list available to channel money and volunteers towards relief efforts.
“We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back,” Obama told reporters after attending church in Lima, Ohio.
“I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary,” he said.
The Republican convention was to open for two-and-a-half hours yesterday simply to put in place the start of the legal process needed to nominate a presidential and vice presidential candidate, officials said.
“We will refrain from any political rhetoric which would be traditional in an opening session,” McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said.
“Right now we have a horrible storm bearing down on the Gulf, people should be more concerned about that than a political campaign and that is the way we are going to let the chips fall,” Davis said.
It was unclear whether the four-day convention would resume as planned today.
Davis left open the possibility that other activities this week could be canceled or curtailed, saying he could not speculate about what would happen in St. Paul beyond the minimal events being held yesterday.
Organizers said they would plan day to day based on the impact of the hurricane. Whether McCain himself would appear in St. Paul was up in the air.
McCain was scheduled to close the convention with his nomination acceptance speech on Thursday.
He told NBC News it was possible that he would deliver his acceptance speech by satellite from the Gulf region, saying “all possibilities and all scenarios” were open.
Gustav’s approach has revived painful memories for Republicans of Katrina, which flooded large sections of New Orleans in 2005 and killed 1,800 people in the region.
Bush took the lion’s share of the blame for the botched recovery effort after Katrina, which saw poverty-stricken people abandoned in the city, and the Republican brand has still to recover.
Meanwhile, two leading US newspapers — the Washington Post and the New York Times — said McCain still had to establish his individuality as a presidential candidate. The Times said McCain no longer appears to be as independent from Bush’s White House as before.
Also See: Bush heads south as Gustav nears
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