As Republican officials watch the Weather Channel to monitor Hurricane Gustav, Sen. John McCain is considering whether to curtail or suspend the GOP Convention in Minnesota.

“It just wouldn’t be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster, so we’re monitoring it from day to day, and I’m saying a few prayers too,” McCain told Fox News Sunday in an interview taped Saturday with Chris Wallace.

In large part, the concern about Gustav results from memories of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which was a personal disaster for the people of Louisiana and Alabama and a political disaster for President Bush and his administration.

A staple of McCain’s stump speech during the primaries was to declare “never again” will incompetence greet a natural or man-made disaster in the U.S. “Never again will we send ice to Maine,” he often says.

“What they don’t want is a split screen showing smiling, cheering Republicans on one side and death and devastation on the other,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. “I don’t know if it’s practical to cancel or postpone it, but they could very well dispense with some of the more festive aspects.”

I would say that last statement is the more accurate……hard to get any bump coming out of a massive party when Americans are dying and suffering.  It will be a political decision not a humanitarian one.