Instead of speaking to the convention Monday night, Bush planned to fly Monday to Austin and San Antonio to meet with emergency responders and evacuees. The Republican National Committee was also chartering a DC-9 to fly delegates back home to affected states, according to McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.
Davis told reporters here that seven-hour program scheduled for Monday night would be pared down to a bare-bones afternoon session of roughly two hours devoted mainly to meeting the legal requirements involved with convening the party's nominating convention. He said that there would be no partisan speeches and that officials would assess what to do with the rest of the convention once it became clear the magnitude of the storm damage. He said that they would seek to make sure that "nothing new distracts from the" response efforts in the Gulf.
It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays with the media, and what impact it ultimately has on the race. The Monday night session of the Dems convention (with Michelle Obama and Ted Kennedy speaking) drew 22 million viewers. If a 30 second Superbowl ad costs about $3 million and reaches 80 million people, then 30 minutes of speeches by Michelle and Ted reaching 22 million people is worth about $45 million. This is a really blunt measurement, of course, and it's quite likely that the GOP Monday lineup of Bush, Cheney and Arnold would probably not be quite the same draw. Regardless, it's hard to overstate the importance of the chance to reach a massive national audience essentially for free.
On the other hand, it may be a relief to McCain's folks to have any easy way to keep W and co. and the administration's 30% approval rating off the stage altogether without any awkward questions.
The real benefit, however, is that being able to cancel the convention, juggle around speakers and charter rescue jets to fly delegates back to their kids gives McCain something to actually in the face of the hurricane. Senators can't really do much in the face of natural disasters other than appear on TV and call for federal aid or go to the disaster site for photo ops. Because of their campaigns, McCain and Obama have the added ability to mobilize their supporters to act and use their influence to try to get folks in the danger zone to evacuate. All of those things, however, are still just variations on talking. By having a convention to cancel and delegates to fly around, McCain has the significant advantage of getting to actually do something, no matter how peripheral to the real disaster preparations. This feeds into the ongoing narrative that McCain is a man of action while Obama is merely a talker. I'm interested to see what steps Obama takes to escape the box of that narrative.
No comments:
Post a Comment