Already Overshadowed by Gustav, GOP Convention Must Also Confront Hanna

Gustav Makes Landfall on Louisiana Coast, Storm Surge Tops New Orleans Levees; Hanna Becomes Hurricane, May Threaten East Coast by Wednesday; Convention's Opening-Night Schedule is Scrapped; McCain's VP Pick Palin Drops Bombshell That Her Unmarried Teen-Aged Daughter is Pregnant



Workers put the finishing touches Sunday on preparations for the Republican National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. With Hurricane Gustav slamming into the Gulf Coast Monday morning, Republican White House hopeful John McCain on Sunday ordered the scrapping of all but the most essential business on the convention's opening-night schedule on Monday night -- and did not rule out the possibility that he might postpone or even cancel his Thursday-night acceptance speech. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Hannah intensified into a hurricane Monday afternoon and may pose a threat to the East Coast as early as Wednesday. (Photo: Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse)


(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, September 1, 2008)
(Updated 4:15 p.m. EDT Monday, September 1, 2008)

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HURRICANE COVERAGE: Daily updates on Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna will continue as events warrant. Beginning next week, The 'Skeeter Bites Report will expand its regular publication schedule from once a week to twice-weekly, with new articles posted every Monday and Thursday. The expansion is being made in response to numerous reader requests for more coverage of the presidential campaign, as well as for other, non-political news.

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By Skeeter Sanders

Already forced to tone down the party because of Hurricane Gustav's rampage through the Gulf Coast, organizers of the Republican National Convention must now contend with a possible threat to the East Coast by Hurricane Hanna before the week is out.

As Gustav, a powerful Category 2 hurricane, slammed into the Gulf Coast Monday morning -- just three days after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastating rampage through the region -- GOP officials, under direct orders from presumptive presidential nominee John McCain, canceled nearly all of the convention's opening-night schedule.

Tropical Storm Hanna, churning in the Atlantic, intensified into a Category 1 hurricane Monday afternoon, bringing fierce 75-mile-per-hour winds and battering waves to the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Forecasters warned it could hit the Eastern Seaboard -- possibly the Carolinas -- by Wednesday or Thursday.

"Right now, the uncertainty is such that it could hit anywhere from Miami to the outer banks of North Carolina," said Jessica Schauer Clark, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "So people really need to keep an eye on it."

Only Essential Business Will Be Conducted at Convention Tonight

Representative John Boehner (R-Ohio), the House GOP leader and chairman of the convention, said mandatory business -- approval of the convention rules and the Republican Party's platform -- will go on as planned, but everything else on Monday night's intinerary had been scrapped.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and all five Gulf Coast GOP governors -- Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindahl of Louisiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Robert Riley of Alabama and Charlie Crist of Florida -- canceled plans to attend the convention to deal with the oncoming crisis.

First Lady Laura Bush and first lady hopeful Cindy McCain will address the convention to encourage people to donate to the relief efforts in the Gulf region, a senior McCain campaign official told reporters in a conference call.

"This is a time when we have to do away with our party politics and we have to act as Americans," McCain told reporters early Sunday evening after his arrival in Minneapolis. The Arizona senator's campaign manager, Rick Davis, added that the opening program would be "business only and will refrain from political rhetoric."

McCain did not rule out the possibility that he might postpone or even cancel his acceptance speech, which is scheduled for Thursday night, if Gustav proves to be as devastating to the Gulf Coast region as Katrina was.

Storm Surge Splashing Over Industrial Canal Levees; Three Ships Break Loose from Canal Docks

In New Orleans, live TV pictures showed waters whipped by Gustav's winds splashing over the tops of reconstructed levees along New Orleans' Industrial Canal Monday, but that by 2:00 p.m. EDT, the levees were holding. The levees were rebuilt after a massive breach from Hurricane Katrina that flooded and destroyed the city's Lower Ninth Ward.

A much greater threat to the levees emerged when three vessels - a tugboat, a decommissioned Navy ship and a barge -- broke free from their moorings and were reported drifting in the violent waters -- prompting fears that the vessels could crash into the canal's levees and cause a "catastrophic" failure.

In dramatic footage broadcast on Fox News, the Army Corps of Engineers sent a recovery team into the raging waters to retrieve a propane gas tank that had broken loose from the Corps' tugboat and was threatening to crash into the levee.

Grand Isle, in the middle of Gustav's path, was covered in water, and power outages blacked out parts of downtown New Orleans, including the French Quarter and Children's Hospital.

There were concerns that if Gustav moves up the Mississippi's estuaries, parts of New Oleans' levee system may not hold, resulting in severe flooding. Although many levees have been repaired and heightened since Katrina, construction and repair work won't be completed until 2011, officials say.

The U.S. Geological Survey said Gustav had already caused a nearly nine-foot storm surge in Pointe a La Hache, Louisiana, about 40 miles southeast of New Orleans. Another one to three feet of surge could occur, the USGS said.

Convention to Take On More Somber Tone, McCain Says

McCain, the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee, and his newly-selected vice-presidential running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, were in Jackson, Mississippi at midday Sunday at the invitation of Barbour to survey preparations for Gustav.

In an interview taped in Washington on Saturday for broadcast on "Fox News Sunday," McCain said that the tone of the convention will be more serious then originally planned. "We don't want to appear in any way festive when you have that kind of tragedy, possibly, revisiting itself on the city of New Orleans and areas around it," he said. "So we'll be judging it day by day and looking at the options."

Among those options included transforming the convention into a telethon-like fundraiser for hurricane relief efforts. Given McCain's scathing criticism of the Bush administration's response to Katrina -- and Bush's dismal 21 percent job-approval rating, the worst of any president in modern American history -- Bush's absence from the convention may prove to be a blessing in disguise for the party.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama made a pointed reference to Bush's handling of the Katrina disaster in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver Thursday night, when he referred to Americans as being "more compassionate than a government. . . that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes. . . Tonight,I say to the people of America -- to Democrats and Republicans and independents across this great land -- Enough!"

Gustav Poses Logistical, TV Nightmare for Convention Planners

Convention planners acknowledged that Gustav was posing both a logistical and television-coverage nightmare. With as many as 45,000 people gathered in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to attend the four-day confab, there's no way the party can postpone the convention entirely, but GOP officials remain deeply fearful of split-screen TV images of delegates whooping it up on one side and of destruction wrought by Gustav on the other.

For Republicans, Gustav is one more obstacle thrown into their path toward a November election victory, a path already littered with a deeply unpopular war in Iraq and unease over Bush's overall foreign policy; controversies over alleged abuses of power by the Bush White House; an economy on the brink of -- if not already in -- a recession; several high-profile Republicans, most notably Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, embroiled in scandals; and a lame-duck president with the worst job-approval ratings on record.

Both McCain and Palin could also find themselves robbed of valuable television time when they deliver their acceptance speeches if Gustav proves to be as destructive as Katrina and the TV networks concentrate their coverage on the hurricane instead of on the convention.

TV Networks Already Shift Focus Away From Convention Toward Gustav

Already, the networks shifted focus and personnel away from the Twin Cities to New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities lying in Gustav's path, leaving convention officials and network news chiefs alike wondering how much of their months-long plans for the convention will be ruined.

Anchors Katie Couric of CBS, Charles Gibson of ABC, Brian Williams of NBC, Anderson Cooper of CNN and Shepard Smith of Fox were all going to the New Orleans area for the storm instead of St. Paul for the convention.

Whether any of them will be heading north will depend on the strength and impact of the storm at Monday's expected landfall. "We're going to go with the biggest story of the day tomorrow," said Jay Wallace, a news vice president at Fox, "and right now the biggest story of the day is the storm."

Along with Smith, Fox was sending Geraldo Rivera and at least a dozen crews to the Gulf. Fox had been anticipating a big week in St. Paul: its ratings topped every broadcast and cable network at the 2004 GOP convention in New York.

But the conservative-leaning news channel also scored big ratings for its coverage of Katrina -- which was punctuated by gut-wrenching on-the-scene reports by Smith and Rivera of the chaos that ensued in New Orleans after Katrina struck.

For his part, Wolf Blitzer was anchoring CNN's covereage on Sunday from the nearly empty convention floor, yet he was talking almost exclusively about Gustav and its potential impact.

Unanswered Questions About McCain's VP Pick Also Vex Republicans

Aside from being overshadowed by Gustav, Republicans also face many unanswered questions being asked by the public about McCain's running mate. Although highly popular at home in Alaska, with an 80 percent job-approval rating as governor, Palin is largely unknown nationally -- and already, Republicans have been put on the defensive about McCain's pick.

At 44 years of age, Palin is not only younger than the 47-year-old Obama, but has less governmental experience than the Illinois senator, including, most Republicans acknowledge, no foreign-policy experience at all -- a fact that has effectively neutralized the McCain campaign's chief weapon against the Democratic nominee.

And despite Palin's open appeal to disappointed supporters, mostly women, of defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, Palin's selection was made more to appease the GOP's hard-line social conservatives, with her steadfast opposition to abortion rights -- a position unlikely to draw support from Clinton's most loyal constituency.

A USA Today/Gallup Poll released Friday found that 33 percent of respondents didi not believe that Palin was ready to serve as president in the event that McCain -- who introduced his running mate on his 72nd birthday -- was unable to complete his term, either through death or incapacitation.

Not since Dan Quayle's selection as George H.W. Bush's running mate in 1988 has a vice presidential candidate scored that low in public-opinion surveys -- although Republicans were quick to point out that Quayle's unpopularity proved not to be an impediment to the elder Bush's victory in the 1988 election over Democrat Michael Dukakis.

A Shocker: Palin Reveals Her Teen-Aged Daughter is Pregnant

In a stunning announcement, Palin disclosed Monday afternoon that her teen-aged daughter is expecting a baby. Seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin has been pregnant for five months.

The GOP vice-presidential nomiinee-designate vowed, however, that her daughter will keep the baby and marry the father.

"We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us," Palin said in a statement. "Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned.

"We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents," Palin continued. "As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support."

According to Reuters, McCain campaign officials knew about Bristol's pregnancy during the vetting process.

The fact that Bristol became pregnant out of wedlock might not sit well with social conservatives, who fiercely disapprove of sex outside of marriage. On the other hand, Bristol's commitment to keep the baby and to marry the father of the child could put pro-life social conservatives in more of a forgiving mood.

Palin Pick Under Fire in Alaska

McCain's selection of the Alaska governor already has come under fire in her home state from an unlikely direction: A supporter of Palin's 2006 run for governor and a former staff member in her administration questioned Palin's qualifications to be vice president.

"She's not qualified, she doesn't have the judgment, to be next in line to the president of the United States," Larry Persily, a former congressional liaison at the governor's Washington office, said in an interview Saturday with the Bloomberg News Service.

Persily resigned in June out of frustration because the state was "fighting the same old wars" in its nearly 30-year effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling -- which Palin strongly supports, but McCain fiercely opposes.

Jim Whitaker, the Republican mayor of Fairbanks who also supported Palin's gubernatorial run, told the business news wire that while he is "still an avid supporter" of Palin as governor, he, too had doubts about her fitness to step up to the presidency in case McCain in unable to complete his term.

Whitaker also said that despite McCain's selection of Palin, he would continue to support Obama in the fall campaign.

GOP's Hopes to Stop Obama 'Bounce' Fail

Republicans had hoped that Palin's selection on Friday -- a day after Obama's acceptance speech -- and the rare short interval between the two party conventions would help blunt any momentum that Obama gained. But Gallup's daily tracking poll showed Obama making a substantial surge even before he delivered his acceptance speech, powered in part by the massive show of unity between the Obama and Clinton camps.

The poll found Obana, the first-ever African-American presidential nominee of a major political party, surging from a two-point lead over McCain before the Democratic Convention to a solid eight-point advantage at the convention's end.

Moreover, Obama's history-making acceptance speech -- which coincided with the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" address at the 1963 Freedom March on Washington -- was watched by 38 million people, according to the A.C. Nielsen TV ratings service, a substantial increase from the 31 million viewers who watched John Kerry's acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston.

If McCain's acceptance speech, scheduled for Thursday night, is pre-empted by Gustav coverage, it could be disastrous for the GOP nominee.

(The Associated Press and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.)

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Volume III, Number 50
Copyright 2008, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

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