Party leaders scrambled to change their plans, keen not to be seen by voters as mounting a celebratory event while a potential natural disaster unfolds on the Gulf Coast, exactly three years after the Hurricane Katrina tragedy.

"I hope and pray we will be able to resume some of our normal operations as quickly as possible," McCain told reporters via a video link from St. Louis, after returning from a tour of relief preparations in Mississippi.

"We're going to suspend most of our activities tomorrow, except for those absolutely necessary," said McCain, who is facing the prospect that his best chance to sell his case to voters will be severely curtailed by the storm.

"I hope and pray we will be able to resume some of our normal operations as quickly as possible, but some of that is frankly in the hands of God."

The Arizona senator said convention delegates needed to "take off our Republican hats, and put on our American hats and we say America, we're with you."

Hurricane Gustav's approach has revived painful memories for Republicans of Katrina which drowned large sections of New Orleans in 1995 and killed 1,800 people in the region.

President George W. Bush took the lion's share of the blame for the botched recovery effort which saw poverty-stricken people abandoned in the city, and the party's brand has still to recover.

McCain's convention manager Rick Davis said the convention would open for just over two hours on Monday, solely to go through procedures necessary under law to begin the process of nominating a president and vice president.

"We will refrain from any political rhetoric which would be traditional in an opening session," Davis said.

"Right now we have a horrible storm bearing down on the Gulf, people should be more concerned about that than a political campaign and that is the way we are going to let the chips fall."

Democratic nominee Barack Obama meanwhile said he would open up his vast donor list to channel money or volunteers to help the recovery efforts, in response to Gustav, which is set to hit the Louisiana coast on Monday.

"We can activate an email list of a couple million people who want to give back," Obama told reporters after attending church in Lima, Ohio.

"I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary."

Bush said earlier Sunday he would skip the planned convention speech, and instead monitor the storm and evacuation efforts in Texas.

"In light of these events I will not be going to Minnesota for the Republican National Convention," Bush said.

"I will travel down to Texas tomorrow to visit with the emergency operations center in Austin," where Texas and Louisiana responses to Hurricane Gustav are being coordinated.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Vice President Dick Cheney also scrapped his planned speech on Monday night.

McCain and top surrogates earlier took to the talk-show circuit on Sunday to defend his choice of first term Alaska governor Palin as his vice presidential pick, as Democrats warned she was woefully short of experience.

McCain described Palin as a "soul mate" and a reformer.

"She's got the right judgement.

"She's been a commander in chief of the Alaska national guard," said McCain, adding Palin's son, who is in the US Army, is shortly to be deployed to Iraq.

Democrats and some political commentators have savaged McCain's pick of Palin, 44, a mother of five, over her lack of expertise in foreign affairs, saying she is too inexperienced to be a "heartbeat" away from the presidency.

McCain's wife Cindy also defended her husband's decision to turn to Palin, which electrified the crucial conservative powerbase in the Republican Party.

"Remember, Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. So it's not as if she doesn't understand what's at stake here," she said on ABC.

Democrat John Kerry however, said on the same channel that the selection proved McCain was "erratic."

"John McCain's judgment is once again, put at issue, because he's chosen somebody who clearly doesn't meet the national security threshold, who is not ready to be president tomorrow."

earlier related report
Bush to skip convention, monitor hurricane in Texas
US President George W. Bush said Sunday he will not attend the Republican National Convention this week due to the dangerous hurricane threatening the US Gulf coast, and that he will instead monitor the storm and evacuation operations Monday in Texas.

"In light of these events I will not be going to Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. I will travel down to Texas tomorrow to visit with the emergency operations center in Austin" where Texas and Louisiana responses to Hurricane Gustav are being coordinated.

"I'll have a chance to visit with residents of both states who have been evacuated," Bush said from the Washington offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Earlier the White House said that, with the category three Hurricane Gustav expected to strike the Gulf Coast Monday, neither Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney would attend the convention Monday.

But First Lady Laura Bush would go as planned, they said.

The convention, in St Paul Minnesota over September 1-4, is to officialy designate John McCain as the Republican candidate in the November 4 presidential election.

Bush, whose reputation suffered severely from the massively botched government response to Hurricane Katrina almost exactly three years ago after it burst levees in New Orleans and killed 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast, warned that Gustav was dangerous.

But he assured that federal, state and local agencies were coordinating well for the more than one million people evacuating the storm from the Louisiana coast.

"Several states including Missouri, Texas and New Mexico are preparing to and have accepted a lot of evacuees," he said.

"There are millions of meal and millions of liters of water prestaged as well as a lot of blankets and cots," ready for people evacuating but with no place to go, he said.

"The Army Corps of Engineers assures me that while the levees are stronger than they have ever been, people across the Gulf coast especially in New Orleans need to understand that in a storm of this size there are serious risks of significant flooding," Bush said.

"The message to the people of the Gulf coast is, this storm is dangerous."

Bush added that he did not plan to visit Louisiana Monday "because I do not want my visit to impede in any way the response of our emergency personnel."

"I hope to be able to get to Louisiana as soon as conditions permit."

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