This was to have been a big day at the Republican National Convention with the president and the vice president scheduled to speak. Instead, the game was cancelled due to rain. The big men all in the Gulf region tended to Gustav now, thankfully, downgraded to a category one. This left the women to prevail, like nurses on a battlefield. The enormously popular First Lady Laura Bush appeared before the huge enormous video wall, with a virtual flag unfurling in the background.

Of late, Mrs. Bush has become a fictional character with novelist Curits Sittenfeld's just-published American Wife with, it should be noted, some very convincing and disconcerting scenes of conjugal harmony. She was demure, as always, in a trim ivory suit and sensible heels, beseeching the multitudes to stop their applause and let her speak. She implored the delegates, and whatever viewers may have turned on the tube on a splendid Labor Day at 5:50 p.m., "that first we're Americans." True, but then she noted that the five Gulf Coast governors "all happen to be Republicans."

 Can a disaster be appropriated by a political event? Certainly, Katrina, the horror that it became, was a watershed for the Democratics and a flood of biblical proportions for Bush. Gustav seems a signal that this is the GOP's time to harness a storm. Certainly, Gov. Texas Rick Perry tried to make that claim in the first of four Gulf governor recorded addresses to the GOP faithful. He stood before a massive military aircraft flanked by National Guardsmen intoning the values of the party. By contrast, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, Mississippi's Haley Barbour (a former GOP chair, wistful about missing the proceedings) and Florida's Charlie Christ (once a potential veep candidate) were less partisan in their announcements. Understandably, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, a rising star in the party who was scheduled to speak Wednesday, was absent from the addresses.

 After the announcements, Cindy McCain appeared, resplendent in a gold shirt dress and towering heels. She looked so shiny and new, compared to the demure Laura Bush. The truth is she's never looked better, her face softened by banged and aglow with color. She seemed a shiny penny -- or, perhaps, a gold dollar -- at the proceedings. And then it was all done by 6 p.m.

Is there a Twins game tonight? It was the right thing to do for the party, and the country. But what of the punditocracy? How will MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, the Martin and Lewis -- or, if your're younger, the Liam and Noel Gallagher -- of cable news? What will their Herculean egos battle about for the next 400 hours? Out bet: Sarah Palin's unborn grandchild. With the storm appearing the wane, the Xcel Energy Center dark, Labor Day evening extending, that will be a lot of dead time to fill and hot air to blow. Fear not, there's a new episode of Gossip Girl at 8 p.m.