Where's the Teeth?

ST. PAUL—“Nice place out here,” said Rudy Giuliani.

The former mayor and his wife, Judith, had just arrived at a private party—re-purposed as a benefit for Hurricane Gustav relief—thrown in his honor on the terrace of an upscale restaurant in downtown Minnesota a few hours after the opening of the Republican National Convention.

Waitresses in thigh-baring skirts passed around buckets of Möet and trays of chocolate to senators and congressmen and supporters, who lounged on red-cushioned couches, unwrapped their complimentary cigar clippers and admired the view of the city’s bustling Hennepin Avenue. Mr. Giuliani’s longtime security detail and his usual coterie of former deputy mayors, including Peter Powers and Tony Carbonetti, accompanied him past greeters dressed in imitation Red Cross red T-shirts and behind a private VIP section of the terrace. They partied and puffed away under a digital billboard, visible from the street, which showed Geraldo Rivera reporting live from a Gustav-drenched street corner in New Orleans.

It was all a little too pleasant, as it turned out. Mr. Giuliani, along with other go-to McCain surrogates on the issue of security, was supposed to have delivered the keynote address at the convention, anchoring a program designed to turn Barack Obama into the next John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran transformed, with spectacular effectiveness, into an effete weenie.

Instead, Mr. Giuliani and the rest were left to cool their heels at social events while the opening nights of the convention, such as they were, were given over to expressions of concern about the storm and partisan self-congratulation about the response of Gulf-region Republican officials to the emergency.

The key case against the Democrats—that they can’t keep Americans safe—would have to wait.

“We haven’t really had a chance to get it started,” Mr. Giuliani told The Observer on Monday night. “I think John McCain acted appropriately in moving off the convention until we made sure that everything in New Orleans and the South was O.K. And we’ll see where we go from there.”

Asked what he intended to speak about, Giuliani only said, “I’m going to do my job to do everything I can to get John McCain elected because I think it is so critical for the country.”

At the Republican convention in 2004, speaker after speaker sought to emasculate Mr. Kerry. Mr. Giuliani’s planned keynote address was to be the centerpiece of an equivalent effort to destroy Mr. Obama this time around.

Instead, though, the Republicans have so far spent much of their time talking about the Gulf storm and the pregnant daughter of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Their lineup for the second night of the convention, after a truncated and inconsequential first night, was highlighted by Fred Thompson, Joe Lieberman and, to the probable delight of the entire Democratic Party, a video address by President Bush.

So what about the rough stuff? The hard-hitting, emotional appeals to voters not to hand the White House—and the country’s security—over to a bunch of naïve Democratic quislings?

Bill Simon, the former policy director for Mr. Giuliani’s failed presidential campaign, said after the Monday-night Giuliani fund-raiser that he expected the former mayor to make the case why “Obama might not be a good president.” Asked whether the Republicans would have sufficient opportunity to define Mr. Obama as a national security novice, Mr. Simon said, “They’ll have plenty of time; there will be more of a regular convention.”

THE FIRST APPEARANCE of John McCain at the convention occurred inauspiciously, as a room full of reporters at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul waited silently on Sunday morning for Mr. McCain to brief them about the havoc Hurricane Gustav was wreaking. When Mr. McCain appeared on a flat-screen television, live via satellite from St. Louis, an aide was beside him fiddling with his microphone. Someone in St. Louis turned the camera away, but accidently pointed it at a reflective surface, which showed McCain’s hair being combed and his shirt collar being adjusted.