Gustav lets GOP catch its breath

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- Hurricane Gustav revived fears of the 2005 horrors of Hurricane Katrina. But Gustav hit land with a whimper, not a bang.

At first, it looked as if the Lord Almighty was descending in wrath on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this week. Nothing could have been more devastating to the GOP than a comparable catastrophe to Katrina, which flooded the entire city of New Orleans, leaving thousands dead. Gustav at first threatened to be such a storm: Almost 2 million people evacuated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast before it arrived.

Instead, Gustav seemed to go out of its way to spare the Republicans more controversy and embarrassment. It forced a muted opening to the convention, stripped of the usual bombast, and it gave the convention organizers the excuse of removing President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney from the speaking schedule for the canceled first night. Far more than Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the Republican standard-bearer, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, faces the problem of cutting himself loose from an unpopular president discredited by the endless casualties and costs of the war in Iraq, exceptionally high energy costs and a host of interrelated economic crises hammering the U.S. economy.

Also, Republican joy at McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate Friday was tempered over the weekend with news that Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant and having the baby -- who will be Palin's first granddaughter -- at Christmastime.

Take all that, the Democratic extravaganza in Denver where Obama gave his acceptance speech before a crowd of 84,000 people and a television audience of 40 million, add to this the threat of Gustav, and the omens should have looked dire for McCain.

Instead, at the end of the day McCain's extraordinary luck -- not the luck of a swaggering young Navy combat pilot but the luck of a tortured, defiant and heroic prisoner of war who ended up serving more than two decades in the U.S. Senate -- came up trumps again.

Gustav did not prove a Katrina II, which would certainly have buried McCain's elections hopes once and for all. It followed the pattern of traditional hurricanes and did not devastate any city or major population center.

Federal, state and local emergency agencies that performed so catastrophically in the Katrina disaster looked efficient, responsible and smooth-moving this time around. That included the Louisiana state government under the leadership of Republican maverick Gov. Bobby Jindal. There was no buffoonish Michael Brown at the top of the Federal Emergency Management Agency this time round to be leisurely swapping e-mail messages with any staff member about how good his Nordstrom-bought suits looked on him while New Orleans was drowning in 2005.

There were a lot of other factors that muted the impact of Gustav. Bush and his congresses had systematically neglected maintenance work and resources on the levee system guarding the Lower Mississippi River for years before Katrina hit. They have since been repaired.

New Orleans, it should be noted, remains much more vulnerable than it was in decades past, even if the levees were all restored to full strength. The unprecedented Midwest floods earlier this year demonstrated the impact of global warming on North American weather patterns. And the wetlands that provided New Orleans natural protection for centuries have been systematically stripped by the works of man for decades.

As Gustav gathered team, Democratic National Convention Chairman Don Fowler famously acclaimed the loss of the first day of the Republican convention due to Gustav as a divine sign, and even atheist Michael Moore threatening belief because of it.

The much lower-key approach forced on the Republican convention may not hurt them much -- or at all, contrary to conventional wisdom. All the high-wattage star power that the Democrats blasted out in Denver gave them zero bounce at the end of the show. On Saturday a Gallup tracking poll actually put McCain marginally in the lead. The greatest spectacle in the history of modern national presidential conventions produced a bounce of exactly -- nothing.

At the end of the day, the ambiguous political message of Hurricane Gustav was only to clear the decks for the last two months of the presidential campaign and let the American people decide. Democrat enthusiasts for Gustav's impact, like Fowler, need to learn, just like overconfident Republicans, that it really is a bad mistake to invoke the Good Lord for their partisan, selfish ambitions.

As the Prophet Isaiah famously noted, "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? …

"Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, He taketh up the isles as a very little thing. …

"All nations before Him are as nothing; and they are counted to Him less than nothing, and vanity."