ST. PAUL, Minn. | As Hurricane Gustav bore down on the Gulf Coast, the separate camps of old political rivals President Bush and John McCain maintained constant communication, but in the end both men made largely unilateral decisions regarding their involvement with the Republican National Convention.
Despite the somewhat uneven coordination, the result was unified: an attempt to bury the ghost of Hurricane Katrina and show that Republicans care too.
By the middle of last week, the presumptive presidential nominee had begun rethinking how the Republican convention would move forward, aware that throwing a lavish party in the midst of a devastating hurricane would paint Republicans as callous and crass.
By Saturday, the McCain campaign was moving quickly toward turning the quadrennial celebration into a service event. Mr. McCain said Sunday that the hurricane was a “call to action.”
“As early as Saturday, he said, ’Look, we can’t be having a convention, a party and political speeches, if there’s a major hurricane coming, so figure it out,’” a senior McCain adviser said Monday.
“McCain’s first idea was, ’We’ll just cancel the first session on Monday or Tuesday or however long it’s going on,’” the adviser said, adding that the convention was required to open Monday as it had been scheduled more than two years ago.
Fully aware that his second term was derailed by Katrina, Mr. Bush also saw the coming storm as an opportunity to put Katrina behind him.
During daily talks with the McCain campaign, the president’s representatives said that Mr. Bush was leaning toward not attending the convention’s first day, when he was scheduled to deliver the key prime-time speech of the night.
One senior McCain adviser dismissed any notion that Mr. McCain had told the president - whose approval rating long has been mired around 30 percent - not to visit St. Paul for the convention’s opening session.
“Nobody tells a president what he’s going to do,” the adviser said. “They’re the ones that told us, ’If this thing is coming in on Monday, we won’t be able to come to the convention.’”
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel pointed out that the president had announced his intent to stay home and “focus on hurricane response activities” several hours before the convention organizers announced plans to scale back its activities.
“The president made the decision himself to not go to Minneapolis. That was his decision,” the spokesman said. On Sunday morning, after Mr. Bush decided not to attend the convention, “members of the staff relayed the president’s decision to the RNC and McCain campaign staff,” Mr. Stanzel said.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top economic adviser to Mr. McCain, said: “It was obviously [Mr. Bush’s] call not to come, and to take care of the nation’s business with the hurricane, so we’re pleased he’s doing such a good job with that.”
The McCain campaign and the White House talk almost daily. Campaign adviser Rick Davis usually talks with senior White House adviser Barry Jackson and often with White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten.
One White House official said coordination between the White House and the campaign has “been marked by remarkably good communication and lots of understanding on all sides.”
The two camps would not discuss the details of their daily calls, but would have had the full opportunity to discuss Mr. McCain’s decision to travel to the Gulf Coast, the president’s choice not to attend the convention and the decision to suspend all but essential activities on the convention’s first day.
Mr. McCain’s hastily scheduled trip on Sunday to Jackson, Miss., to visit a hurricane command center did not conflict with the president’s plans, a senior McCain official said, noting that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour had invited the senator from Arizona. Mr. Bush visited a hurricane center in Texas on Monday.
The senior McCain aide said talks began in earnest after an event Friday in Dayton, Ohio, where Mr. McCain appeared with his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
“As of Friday afternoon, after we got the Palin announcement done, Rick Davis said to two or three of us, ’We have to start thinking about this hurricane.’”
“On Saturday morning, McCain asked RNC officials running the convention to start coming up with options,” the senior aide said. The decision to hold a bare-bones convention on the first day was made largely by the McCain campaign and the RNC, and there was little consultation with the White House, a Bush administration official said.
Early on Sunday, Mr. McCain said in Mississippi: “We’ll change our program.
“We must redirect our efforts from the really celebratory event of the nomination of president and vice president of our party to acting as all Americans. We have to go from a party event to a call to the nation for action,” he said of the Republican convention.
The White House also said that the occasional friction between the Bush and McCain teams has not surfaced over the past few days as these momentous decisions were made.
• Mr. Curl reported from Philadelphia.
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