After last weeks eventful and mendacious Republican National Convention in muggy Tampa, Florida, the rest of the nation is now turning their attention to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina this week. The amount of contrast between the two groups has never been starker, Obama seeks to reignite the passion within his supporters which got him to the White House four years ago. The Wrong Wing will have extended coverage of the messages, speakers, and opinionated analysis of the convention, but first as a preface, there is a marked advantage to having the convention after your competitor.
Change is not going to work this time
Having a convention first is like shooting a gun in the dark. You might draw first blood from your target, but you are going to have some collateral damage. Having your convention second is like turning the lights on, then shooting; there might he less to hit but you can pick your targets. In this case, the swing voters who were moved by Romney’s message of believing in America will be less likely to buy into a similar message and rhetoric from Obama. Obama must find a different path to connect with voters and fire up supporters. Hope and change will not work again, and change would of course mean packing his bags come January.
But the Democrats can now go after the GOP without a rebuttal. They can attack Paul Ryan for his lies during his speech, and his gaffes on the campaign trail, most recently about his marathon time (he chopped a full hour off his time claiming it was 2 hrs 50 minutes, putting him close to Olympic range, when he was actually around 4 hours. But seriously who cares, they guy ran a marathon, that should be enough!)
Most of all, the Dems can go after Republican congressmen — a group which is deeply unpopular with the American people — for lowering our credit rating, risking economic collapse via spending and tax cuts, and pursuing conservative social initiatives that were nothing but futile wastes of time and effort.
Probably the biggest target will be Romney himself. Obama will make it clear that Romney is long on talk and short on ideas. In fact during his speech last week, he promised 12 million new jobs, but didn’t provide even the slightest inkling of how he would do that. He wants to drastically cut taxes for everyone, while providing very little information about spending cuts that would keep the debt from exploding. For the Republicans, and especially the Tea Party, this glaring error of mathematics should have made them suspect that they guy they will be voting for is doing nothing about their primary issue while making empty promises, exactly the type of tough talk that Chris Christie was praised for. The hypocrisy has so many levels that two dimensional text is not enough to describe it.
As long as Obama drops some ideas to back up his promises, he should be good to go.
