ST. PAUL — Presidencies are never about what the people who occupy the White House want them to be about. Commanders in chief are defined not by their carefully crafted words during the election season, but by their reaction to events after Election Day that are completely out of their control.
That makes this moment in the 2008 presidential election both unusual and telling.
With Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf Coast, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, will have to decide how or even whether to proceed with his nominating convention here. So fresh is the pain of President Bush’s slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina four years ago that Mr. McCain could well have to choose whether to go ahead with the scheduled celebration or to focus his party’s attention on New Orleans.
Mr. McCain has already showed that he can be bold under pressure. Faced with Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s play-it-safe choice of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. as his vice-presidential pick, Mr. McCain took the biggest gamble of the election. He selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a person with less than two years in the governor’s mansion of a remote and sparsely populated state.
With that choice, Mr. McCain might have risked disqualifying the entire Republican ticket. Even Republicans are finding it hard to argue that Mrs. Palin can step in at a moment’s notice should Mr. McCain - at 72, the oldest person ever to be nominated for a first White House term - be unable to serve as president.
On the other hand, Mr. McCain proved that he is, in fact, a maverick who is willing to think outside the box. Eager to defy the Democrats’ assertion that he is a clone of President Bush, Mr. McCain reached far outside of Washington to find a pistol of a politician who, like himself, has been unafraid to fight established politicians by using a “clean government” pitch.
Mr. McCain, clearly, makes decisions quite differently than both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama. The fate of his presidential campaign could turn on his next one: What to do in St. Paul.
Ed Rogers, a GOP lobbyist and former White House aide says the convention will have to become more subdued if Gustav wreaks havoc on the Gulf.
“You can’t have a raucous party with people wearing funny hats when other people’s homes are being destroyed,” Mr. Rogers said.
But no one knows what Mr. McCain will do. After all, not many people expected him to turn to an obscure governor to be his No. 2.
Mrs. Palin, 44, is the youngest person ever to serve as governor of Alaska and is also the state’s first female governor. She is a mother of five, the oldest of whom is going to Iraq as a soldier and the youngest of whom is an infant with Down syndrome. She is a former beauty queen, a former all-star basketball player and the wife of a union worker.
Like Mr. Biden, she comes from humble beginnings, but unlike him she has no foreign-policy experience.
She is, however, the best qualified person in the field to talk about the nation’s No. 1 issue: energy policy. She massively raised taxes on big oil companies and recently signed a bill that will start the largest construction project in North America - a pipeline to bring natural gas from the North Slope through Canada into the U.S.
She is, in short, quite a package and quite a risk.
Mr. McCain faces a similar quandary with Gustav.
What he does, rather than what he says, will be what’s important to watch.
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