An event like this occurs every 40 years, just about as often as it rains in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
In 1928, after making his famous statement (”I do not choose to run for president”), Calvin Coolidge skipped the Republican convention in Kansas City. In 1968, with much of the country agitated about the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson chose to absent himself from the contentious Democratic convention in Chicago. This week, George W. Bush missed his party’s convention in St. Paul.
McCain is an attractive presidential candidate, and prospective veep Palin (more attractive in all senses of the word) has captured the imagination of the party faithful. Were it not for the Bush/Cheney albatross rotting around the neck of their party, this ticket could run as “good ol’ Republicans.” But by the speeches delivered in Bush’s absence by Romney, Guiliani, Huckabee, Palin, and McCain himself, the GOP’s quest-for-victory strategy now appears to be, We are the NEW Republicans who can fix what’s wrong with the last eight years of Republican-run government. McCain actually said, “We need to change the way government does almost everything: from the way we protect our security to the way we compete in the world economy; from the way we respond to disasters to the way we fuel our transportation network; from the way we train our workers to the way we educate our children.” Having President Bush in attendance would have been awkward.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, immediately after the last televised speech of the convention, expressed amazement at “the bill of divorcement” that McCain had presented to the Bush Administration. [Not up on youtube yet.]
During the months leading up to the Republican convention, the negotiations among
the Republican National Committee, the McCain campaign, and the White House must have been delicate and prickly. Even before Hurricane Gustav gave President Bush a more appropriate task to oversee than the convention’s not-so-subtle non-mention of his administration’s non-accomplishments, his I’m-the-head-of-our-party speech was set for Day One, a speaking slot that would have avoided a face-to-face meeting with McCain and the dreaded photo-[fl]op such a twosome would have afforded an overheated press.
Dick Cheney didn’t attend either. Perhaps he was at an undetermined location in the Atacama Desert.
