James Carville thinks so, and he has a point.
Speaking on CNN, Carville said the party was too soft in its attacks on John McCain Monday night — the same mistake, Carville says, Democrats made at the 2004 convention.
"The way they planned it tonight was supposed to be sort of the personal — Michelle Obama will talk about Barack Obama personally, Ted Kennedy was a very personal, emotional speech," Carville said. "But I guarantee on the first night of the Republican Convention, you're going to hear talk about Barack Obama, commander-in-chief, tax cuts, et cetera, et cetera."
"You haven't heard about Iraq or John McCain or George W. Bush — I haven't heard any of this. We are a country that is in a borderline recession, we are an 80 percent wrong-track country. Health care, energy — I haven't heard anything about gas prices," Carville also says. "Maybe we are going to look better Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But right now, we're playing hide the message."
Carville also said the party needs to do a better job of communicating its message to the American people.
“If this party has a message it's done a hell of a job hiding it tonight, I promise you that," he said.
One of the goals Monday night was obviously to make Michelle Obama more likeable and to make Barack Obama seem more normal. Fair enough. But Carville is right that these goals, even if achieved, are not compelling reasons to vote for Obama. At best, the Dems are playing defense.
Now, as for the issues Carville thinks should be used to lead the attack -- high gas prices, health care, energy -- the problem Democrats have is that they have no solutions. Their "solution" to high gas prices is to ensure that they continue by limiting drilling and taxing oil companies, while subsidizing alternative energy, which in turn has other negative ripple effects on the economy. (Look at the negative effect ethanol mandates have had on food prices, for example.)
The Dem "solution" on heath care is to nationalize the system, which will give a little more everyday free health care to those living on the fringes (they already have free emergency care), but will ruin the system for everyone else by destroying market incentives and driving down quality of medical care to the lowest common denominator and slowing down service as a way of rationing care.
And so it goes with each of the Democrats' solutions. A good 80% of their ideas are impractical and/or counterproductive. Hence, a well-run Democratic Party convention must not be too specific about how the party intends to solve all the world's ills. A little "hope" here, a little "change" there, and we're good to go, right?
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