Strong winds blowing Republican convention off course?
I spent much of yesterday cowering behind granite columns or bus shelters lashed by the wind, soaked to the bone, cursing the skies.
I wasn’t braving the storm deliberately. I wasn’t auditioning for a job on the Weather Channel. I was merely trying to purchase a sandwich outside the heavily fortified bubble that is the Tampa Convention Centre.
This usually laid-back Florida city has been turned into a mini police state in a climate disaster movie.
Most of the shops and restaurants have been shuttered for the week. Tampa is largely deserted. The Convention Complex has been cordoned off by a confusing maze of twelve foot high police barriers that are as inviting as the Berlin Wall.
The cops, shipped in from other parts of the state and decked out in “friendly” kaki uniforms are deployed in phalanxes across the city. Some are on bikes. Some on horse back. Others patrol the angry skies in helicopters.
They need not have bothered. The demonstrators are at home, safe and dry, like most sensible people watching the Weather Channel, mesmerized by satellite images of the swirling blancmange called Isaac as it makes it’s way across the baby bath warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Hurricanes love warm water. They fuel them. The outliers of the storm may have drenched Tampa. But the storm itself has avoided the west coast of Florida. Phew!
Unfortunately for the GOP it has created a whole new nightmare. It is heading towards New Orleans with uncanny timing. It is due to slam into the city precisely – almost to the hour – seven years after hurricane Katrina turned the Big Easy into a Big Stink, filled it up like a bathtub, killed over a thousand people and exposed the Bush administration as out of touch and incompetent.
It was George Bush’s worst hour and arguably did more damage domestically to the image of the previous Republican administration than Iraq. The last thing the Republicans want as they hunker down for a week of Obama bashing and Mitt mania – however manufactured – is a split screen showing Republican balloons and silly hats in one half and New Orleans getting blown and flooded in the other.
Not only would the nation not listen to a word of Mitt Romney’s key note speech – and he really needs them to listen – it would also make the GOP look insensitive. As Mitt mounts the stage asking America to imagine him as Commander in Chief, Obama would no doubt be down in the Gulf in a wind breaker jacket emblazoned with the crest of the White House hauling bags of ice.
The Networks have already been distracted by the storm. Anderson Cooper, CNN’s storm stud and chief anchorman has ditched his convention suit for his signature tight fitting t-shirt and extreme weather skin, abandoning Tampa for New Orleans. The Weather Channel’s buff Jim Cantore is deployed in the famous French Quarter looking as mean and muscular as a meteorological super hero. Watch out Isaac. Al Roker, America’s most famous weatherman is also there. He has been on the air since 4 am and thanks to jet lag I am watching them all with a strange nostalgia for places like Jefferson or Plaquemines parish in New Orleans that I haven’t heard mention since Katrina.
Isaac may not strengthen Katrina-style, New Orleans’ new levees may well hold and hopefully no one will have to die. But thanks to the big weather America is talking more about Isaac than Mitt this week and that is just rotten bad luck for the Republicans.
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