If you needed a playbook on how to use an imminent national crisis as a political re-branding apparatus, what would it look like?
Maybe you'd head down to the hurricane zone, ostensibly to gather information. You'd deep-six the first part of your party's convention (I assume everyone's heartbroken Bush won't be joining) so as not to overlap with the terrible storm.
But you'd also try to look and sound presidential, standing with your running mate and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour:
"...there's very little doubt that we have to go from a party event to a call to the nation for action, action to help our fellow citizens in this time of tragedy and disaster, action in the form of volunteering, donations, reaching out our hands and our hearts and our wallets to the people who are under such great threat from this great natural disaster."
And you'd use the crisis to continue your phony re-branding as an a-partisan reformer:
...Republican lawmakers are tying the storm plans to one of John McCain's central campaign themes: putting the country's interests above party politics.A short time ago, I talked to Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who was running around trying to figure out the same thing we all are -- what comes next in the Twin Cities. Technically, Coleman said, the Republicans have to have a convention in some form. They can't have a presidential nominee without one. But "John McCain's whole message is about putting country first," Coleman said, and whatever the Republicans do with their rewritten convention agenda, whether it's a telethon or something else, will be geared toward that theme.
"We will be sending a very clear message to this convention that it's country first, not politics first," Coleman said.
"Country first," huh? How convenient. As I wrote before, the "Country First" slogan is becoming a crowbar for McCain to wedge between himself and George Bush's Republican party.
And it just so happens to be the theme of the GOP's convention.It's absurd.
As a reminder, the great and thankfully now un-retired Bob Geiger chronicles McCain's opposition to Katrina relief.
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