The Hurricane In Question Is Still Called Katrina

McCain's week is far from lost. For years, there have been calls for the parties to shorten their nominating conventions to two or three days at most. That could be what Republicans end up with, and a storm-delayed convention might prove even more compelling than one built around a familiar and in many ways tired model.

Without all the drama over what Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, would say last week, the Democrats might have struggled to keep the public interested in all four days of their convention. McCain would have been hard pressed to compete with Obama's final night, the extravaganza at Invesco Field, where more than 80,000 people turned out to hear the Democratic nominee give his acceptance speech. Now he won't have to try.

Beyond that, Republicans had a string of elected officials and party luminaries on the agenda, but few who could match the star power of the Clintons in Denver or even the program the GOP opened with in New York four years ago. That group included former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, then still the hero of Sept. 11, 2001, but this year a more diminished figure after his unsuccessful run for the presidency; McCain as Bush's most forceful defender on going to war in Iraq; and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What Republicans may lose is the opportunity to make their case against Obama, a job normally left to surrogates in the early days of the convention. With politics-as-usual wiped from the early schedule, that anti-Obama message will be far more muted that it ordinarily might have been.

Here in St. Paul, there were arguably only three key speeches on the four-day schedule. The first was Bush's, the second the acceptance speech by the little-known Palin and the third McCain's acceptance speech on the convention's final night.

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. McCain has moved quicker on that front, but the Democrats will certainly adapt.

For now, the presidential campaign will be frozen in place until Gustav has played itself out. Whom that helps can't be foretold. McCain's pick of Palin shifted focus from Obama to the GOP, but Gustav has robbed McCain of the limelight. Americans are now riveted on the storm in the Gulf Coast rather than the convention center here in St. Paul. As Tom Rath, a veteran Republican strategist from New Hampshire, put it: "A sure, sensitive and effective response is more important than staging or rhetoric."