Giuliani has benefited greatly by his unavoidable comparison to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Obviously, hurricanes and terrorist attacks are vastly different, especially in scope. But Nagin missed his bullhorn moments: first, before the storm when he might have evacuated thousands of poor people without access to transportation; second, immediately afterward when his city quickly turned into a swamp of anarchy.
If Katrina is remembered as the storm that destroyed New Orleans, Nagin will be remembered as the mayor who lost control. By comparison, Giuliani is forever imprinted on the American psyche as the Eveready-man, able to manage whatever furies are unleashed by Earth's wrath or Hell's wraiths.
McCain may have benefited politically even more than Giuliani from the storms' ripples. As Americans recoil in horror at the projected $200 billion federal price tag attached to rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (and who knows for Rita), McCain is one of the few voices - along with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. - calling for government restraint.
Not against the spending per se, as the federal government is mandated by law to cover a certain percentage of reconstruction costs following disaster. But against pork-barrel and other unnecessary spending during a time of war and natural disaster.
While some are calling for cuts in war spending and troop withdrawal from Iraq to meet these expenses, McCain and Coburn issued a joint statement calling on Congress to "lead by example" by cutting pork-barrel spending to help fund hurricane relief. They made some progress Wednesday as Coburn succeeded in getting the Senate to pass an amendment attached to the Agriculture appropriations bill that would "lift the veil of secrecy that conceals the process of inserting special projects - or pork - into appropriations bills."
Thus McCain, as a voice of fiscal conservatism in a party that has strayed far from that principle, may evolve as the hurricane candidate. Hurricane McCain? A war hero in a time of war, who is also a small-government conservative in an era of deficit spending, sounds like a perfect storm.