GOP weather worries

There’s nothing funny about the threats that the storm-battered people of the Gulf Coast face today, three years to the day after Katrina.

Tropical Storm Gustav, having pelted Jamaica and taken lives in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, may mount to hurricane force as it sweeps toward Louisiana and fragile New Orleans.

Still, it’s hard not to find some dour poetic justice in the word that the storm has Republican Party officials nervously calculating whether to postpone the start of their clambake Monday in St. Paul, Minn.

For those who slept through geography class, St. Paul is more than a thousand miles from the Big Easy. Gustav won’t be bringing sheets of rain to the Twin Cities. Even if it did, there’s no shortage of umbrellas for sale at Target.

That’s not the concern. No, this is a political storm watch.

Katrina wasn’t just a meteorological cataclysm and a human tragedy.

It was the moment when average Americans figured it out. Staring, appalled, at the televised scenes from the Superdome and the Lower Ninth Ward, they put it together:

The Bush administration wasn’t just unlucky. It was incompetent and clueless. (That plenty of Louisiana Democrats were just as bad was no absolution.) The Bush team treated public relations and spin as an all-purpose substitute for hard work and useful deeds. Not only that, it was incompetent by design; it had contempt for the agencies it had been elected to run on behalf of the American people, so it put clowns and cronies in charge.

For the first time, as Anderson Cooper wailed and people suffered, Americans made the connections. Hmm, maybe Iraq was not just a necessarily tough slog; maybe it was the same kind of incompetent fiasco. Maybe it wasn’t just tough luck that had turned federal surpluses into red ink, maybe it was the same blithe disregard for sound governance.

Suddenly, it became clear: People who disdain government can’t be trusted to govern.

In 72 hours, the trapdoor to 30 percent approval ratings opened.

This year, John McCain has eluded to a surprising degree the fallout from this exposure of how bankrupt his party’s ideology has become – in part because he sometimes, not often, but sometimes dissents from it.

So it’s no wonder the Republicans don’t want live, compelling reminders of that terrible week intercut on Americans’ HDTV’s with the GOP’s self-congratulatory speeches and smarmy salvos at Barack Obama. No wonder that they don’t want stories about gas prices rising as storms buffet Gulf oil rigs to haunt their party. After all, their nominee who scrambled back into the race thanks to demagogic pandering about the wonders of offshore drilling.

Any political party would have to be cautious about broadcasting the inane celebrations of a political convention while citizens elsewhere are scrambling to rooftops to avoid rising waters.

But Republicans have more reason to fear this prospect that any gaggle of politicians who ever tried to run away from their records.

Let’s pray Gustav relents, or if not, that the levees (only partially rebuilt in another display of bipartisan incompetence) hold. Americans surely can grasp the vivid political point without a horrible assist from a storm.

Speaking of prayers and weather, there’s an ironic coda to this storm watch. The Focus on the Family Web site, plaything of Dr. James Dobson, the insufferable curmudgeon of the fading Christian right, ran a video earlier this month calling up on the faithful to pray for rain to drench Barack Obama’s outdoor acceptance speech last night in Denver.

Criticized for this inanity, they tried to claim it was a joke.

Apparently the weather gods were not amused. The weather at Invesco Field last night: warm and clear with a fresh breeze.

Now, I don’t for a second believe that the Almighty tinkers with the weather to influence elections, particularly one as diabolically petty and dispiriting as this one became over the summer.

But for those who apparently do, I wonder what messages they’re divining from this week's multicolored swirls on the map in USA Today.

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