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ELECTIONS
Analysis: Politics creeps back into convention
The Ohio delegation applauds as first lady Laura Bush takes the stage during the opening session of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Monday, Sept. 1, 2008.
Purchase this photoST. PAUL, Minn. -- Hard to restrain, politics unmistakenly came creeping back into the Republican National Convention as Hurricane Gustav delivered a softer-than-expected blow on the Gulf Coast. As the storm winds died down, the political winds picked up.
Monday was the day in which GOP presidential candidate John McCain said Republicans should do away with party politics and act simply as Americans in a time of crisis.
But political conventions are all about, well, politics, and telling delegates to refrain from partisanship is like instructing a child to walk through a candy store without begging for a treat.
So there were digs and jabs and pokes aimed at Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
Laura Bush succumbed to the temptation to nudge Obama. So did former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and others. One-time California Gov. Pete Wilson acknowledged the difficulty of following McCain's orders to set politics aside.
"I confess to you, I am a lesser mortal. I find that difficult to do," Wilson told California delegates. "But I will try."
He spent the next 30 minutes doing quite the opposite, however. Wilson lambasted Obama on everything from his foreign policy platform to his positions on energy.
Wilson, who was California's governor from 1991 to 1999, slammed the Democratic platform as nothing more than socialism disguised as change.
"It's the class warfare that has been the staple of that party ever since the New Deal days," Wilson said.
The jabs, though, were not the full-throated, hard-charging attacks that certainly would have been aimed at Obama if the opening night of the convention had not been curtailed and a be-nice muzzle imposed. On the convention floor, the opening night was subdued and delegates were asked to make donations to the Red Cross for victims of the hurricane.
In a similar vein, Obama scaled down his Labor Day campaign schedule and urged support for the Red Cross. Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, said he was toning things down, too, to focus on Gustav but in the end he wound up criticizing McCain.
Biden faulted McCain on foreign policy, health care and his proposed tax cuts for oil companies. "John McCain is still way behind the curve," Biden said.
McCain spokesman Ben Porritt called the statements "clear attacks on a day when politics was to be set aside."
But there were some politics on the Republican side, too.
President Bush's wife dropped by a breakfast meeting of the Louisiana delegation and lobbed a soft verbal punch at Obama. The first lady called McCain "someone who's so experienced, and has paid attention to foreign policy in his job as senator, the whole time, and is very very experienced, especially compared with the other side. And I'm thrilled that he's going to lead our ticket."
A central position of McCain's campaign is that Obama, 47 and in his first term in the Senate, is too inexperienced, too untested to sit in the Oval Office as commander in chief. Democrats now are saying the same thing about McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who would step in as America's leader if something happened to McCain, who at 72 would be elected as the nation's oldest president.
Palin, 44 and a mother of five, has had less than two years as governor of Alaska. Gingrich argued that was not a drawback.
"Any effort to attack Palin on experience raises the comparison with Obama and she has had more experience in the real world doing real things than Obama has," he said. "Every time a liberal starts to talk about her inexperience, they are raising the issue of Obama's total lack of authentic experience to be president."
McCain's campaign team raised the real-world theme after the governor released a statement saying that her her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. The announcement, as the nation's attention was focused on Gustav drenching the Gulf Coast, was aimed at rebutting Internet rumors that Palin's youngest son, born in April, was actually her daughter's.
"Life happens," said McCain spokesman Steve Schmidt. "An American family," added McCain adviser Mark Salter.
GOP delegates said Palin's daughter's pregnancy was a personal matter that would not affect how people will vote.
"It's a nonstory," said Pennsylvania Republican Party Chairman Robert A. Gleason, Jr. He said he had read that Palin's daughter and their baby's father would be getting married. "That's a happy ending to the story."
That said, it was time to take aim at Obama. Gleason argued he doesn't measure up to Palin.
"Barack Obama has never dealt with a legislature as an executive," Gleason argued. She also was commander in chief of the National Guard, no small task given it's proximity to Russia. "If the bear ever comes, he's coming that way," he said.
Delegates like Kelly Burt from California looked forward to more traditional convention week.
"When the storm passes and we can see that there are enough resources and that lives are not in danger any longer and help is on its way or in place," she said, "then that'll be the green light for us to enjoy the celebration we're all here for."
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Terence Hunt has covered the White House since Ronald Reagan's presidency.
