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It’s hard to believe, but Karl Rove, the dark prince of the Republican super PACs and so much more, may actually have had some sincere advice for President Obama on Monday morning.Obama needs to slow down, Rove said. Specifically, the president should cut back on campaigning and raising money, he suggested—possibly out of the Texas operative’s well-known sense of fair play and simple human kindness.

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TAMPA—Michael Steele was playing the odds as Republican Party chairman, signing off on a decision to hold the 2012 convention here on Florida’s west coast at the start of hurricane season.It was a high-stakes gamble that dissolved in the wind and rain.

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Much is being said about the overwhelming whiteness of the delegate mix at the Republican National Convention. But many political movements in this country draw more from some ethnicities than others. It would be no surprise if Republicans felt that this unique criticism of their delegate mix was one sided.

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The GOP convention hasn’t gotten underway, but Mitt Romney just conceded the likability contest.“I don’t think everybody likes me,” Romney told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I don’t believe that, by any means. But I do believe that people of this country are looking for someone who can get the country growing again with more jobs and more take-home pay, and I think they realize this president had four years to do that.

Well, here we go. The week has begun in Tampa, report Adele Stan and Peter Montgomery, with Ralph Reed, that great Christian casino gambling enthusiast, rallying the troops, advocating that the fall election be dedicated to "the Lord.

AP Photo; Landov

Tampa, and the Republican convention, may have dodged a meteorological bullet.But even as Tropical Storm Isaac veers off further down the Gulf Coast, defying earlier predictions, the fallout still threatens to inflict heavy damage on Mitt Romney’s big national moment.

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Republican House member David Dreier is heartily sorry about the social-issue planks in his party’s national convention platform and expects Democrats to exploit them to the hilt to scare off swing voters from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

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As news hit that Tropical Storm Isaac had delayed the Republican National Convention, about 60 protesters milled around their tents in muggy downtown Tampa under a cloudless sky waiting to let their collective voice be heard by the world.

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When I started counting, inside the perimeter of the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the number of machine guns strapped to National Guard or Secret Service personnel totaled 28. All roads but one leading to the Forum—where networks are broadcasting Sunday morning shows—were barricaded, some with snowplow trucks, and the line of cars and trucks angling to make it through wrapped around two blocks.

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Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. The Wright Brothers invented the airplane. And Joe Redner invented the nude lap dance.At least that’s how he’s credited in Tampa, the site of Redner’s Mons Venus strip club on a tacky stretch of Dale Mabry Highway and, funnily enough, the site of this week’s Republican National Convention—a celebration of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the party of family values.

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TAMPA—Hurricane Isaac has hijacked Mitt Romney’s convention, and the damage is as hard to calculate as the extent of the damage from the coming storm.Even as the sun filled the blue sky here after a day of light rain late Saturday, Republican Party officials decided to pull the plug on Monday’s proceedings, wiping out a quarter of the convention.

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Florida shopping-center magnate Mel Sembler is proud to personify the sort of Republican fat cat that Mitt Romney is depending on.The 82-year-old Sembler—the erstwhile finance chairman of the Republican National Committee as well as a former U.

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Rick Santorum has a simple formulation for how the 2012 election will turn out.“If the campaign is about issues, we win,” he tells me. “If it’s about Mitt Romney’s record as a businessman, then we don’t win. If it’s about Mitt Romney’s tax returns, then we don’t win.

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“Do you have a house down here yet?” Florida Gov. Rick Scott asks. “You have to move, right? You don’t have a choice. Better buy now. Housing prices are up 16 percent year over year!”The gaunt, bald multimillionaire—a former hospital-chain tycoon and venture capitalist who depleted his bank account by $78 million to win office in 2010 and since then has been labeled the nation’s least popular governor—is pushing the hard sell in a conference room of the Tampa International Jet Center.

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And the hits just keep on comin’.Mitt Romney got backhanded by yet another Republican colleague Tuesday when John McCain denied rumors that he passed over Romney for the ticket in 2008 because of tax improprieties discovered in the vetting process.