The GOP have decided to put off a day and compressing it into two days, their convention. That's terrible decision making. They should have either postponed it two weeks or pushed it up for this past Friday-Saturday. Here's why.
Moving it down a day to Tuesday, it will compete directly with coverage of a potential category 2 hurricane hitting what is probably the heart of GOP support: Lousiana - Mississippi - Alabama. On Wednesday, the final day of the convention, it will definitely play second fiddle to the hurricane's landfall. For the rest of the week, the news will be talking about all of the destruction in the wake of hurricane Isaac, not the nomination of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
And it will make a lot of people uneasy that, on the one hand there is a celebration going on nationally over Mitt Romney's nomination, while millions of people are suffering from the aftermath of a direct hit from a category 2 hurricane.
All it takes is people taking to YouTube and popping up split screen videos of the GOP convention celebrations at the same time that people are trying to pick up the pieces of a natural disaster. It's a Bush nightmare of detachment, all over again.
And President Obama will be down on the ground in the aftermath, drawing attention away from the GOP convention and towards the resulting tragedy of a natural disaster, directly removing any advantage that the GOP convention would have brought.
Politically speaking, this seems like the makings of a historical blunder.
Update: Well there you go. Hurricane Isaac is now directly projected to hit New Orleans on Wednesday. The revelers at the GOP convention shall find themselves uncomfortably juxtaposed to Isaac, which may hit New Orleans exactly seven years to the day that Katrina hit -- August 29.
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