While we're sure that Republicans wouldn't wish a hurricane on anyone, Hurricane Gustav roared out of the Caribbean at just the right time and struck the Gulf Coast at just the right place to benefit the GOP and their presumptive presidential nominee. For John McCain, Gustav was the perfect storm.

The levees in New Orleans, dealt a glancing blow Monday by the weakened hurricane, held strong. The evacuation was thorough. Order was maintained. The outcome, so unlike that of the more powerful Hurricane Katrina, helped blunt criticism that a Republican administration is incapable of handling a disaster.

Gustav also gave McCain the chance to blow into an emergency operations center Sunday with the press corps in his wake. He appeared attentive, concerned, presidential - all the things that Bush wasn't in the days before and after Katrina.

And the hurricane afforded McCain and party leaders the opportunity to surge in the polls by shrinking the Republican National Convention by a day, not that they had a choice. To make merry and bash Democrats and practice partisan politics during a natural disaster would have been viewed as callous at best.

Normally, such a delay would be a disaster in and of itself, a missed opportunity for one more day of building party unity, one more night of prime-time television coverage. But not this year.

In the calm before the storm, McCain instructed the delegates to "take off the Republican hats" and "put on the American hats." By doing so, he stole some of the thunder from Democratic candidate Barack Obama, who successfully preaches politics of reconciliation and cooperation.

But most fortuitously, Gustav gave the GOP the chance to compress the schedule of speakers, and shuffle unpopular President George W. Bush and his justly reviled sidekick, Dick Cheney, out of the mix.

Bush and Cheney had been scheduled to address the convention in person on national television Monday. Instead, Bush delivered an abbreviated address via satellite Tuesday. While the GOP spin doctors had Bush busy tending to the disaster, it was damage control of another kind.

McCain has been attempting to delicately distance himself from Bush, he of the 30 percent approval ratings. Hurricane Gustav gave him the perfect excuse.