The Ruins of Trenton

President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will skip this week's Republican convention in Minneapolis because of Hurricane Gustav, a White House spokesperson said today.

The announcement came as the Category 3 storm ravaged Cuba in preparation for moving on into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will likely gain strength and become a Category 5 storm capable of wreaking havoc on the Gulf coast in a repeat of the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005.

Disaster relief efforts in still-recovering New Orleans are in full swing, but a situation in any way similar to the 2005 disaster that killed 1,836 people could significantly damage Republican efforts to defeat Democratic Sen. Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election.

Pictures of New Orlans - filled with people on rooftops, houses destroyed, and bodies floating in surging flood waters - still haunt the American psyche as what some saw as evidence of a bungling Bush administration plagued by indifference towards the lives of thousands of New Orleans' overwhelmingly black, and poor, residents.

Hurricane Gustav - set to make landfall as early as Monday - does provide an opportunity for Republicans to get President Bush away from the convention floor, along with the president's dismal approval ratings.

Republicans will be partially saved from trying to divorce themselves from the problems of the Bush administration in the minds of television viewers who would have seen President Bush speaking at the Minneapolis convention, although a White House spokesperson did say that the president would try to somehow deliver his planned speech to the convention, possibly from afar.