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Here's Why The Gop Convention Isn't Working

(Aside from all the conservative red meat and media-bashing.)

As in 2004, there's clearly no shortage of snideness at this convention. The difference with 2004, which I thought was very effective, is that the snideness is all over the place.

If you learned nothing else from 2004, you learned that Kerry was a flip-flopper--that he was before the $87 billion before he was against it--and that he was too wimpy to stand up to terrorists.

So far this week, I've heard that Obama puts himself first rather than his country, that he's inexperienced, that he has no executive experience, that he's a whacked out liberal, that he's a celebrity, that he's unpatriotic, a defeatist, a flip-flopper, a moral relativist. Tonight, for the first time (care of Rudy Giuliani), I heard that he spent time in an apparently shameful profession called "community organizing." And that he voted "present" over 100 times in the Illinois state Senate. I haven't really heard the same critique more than twice, though. I have a hard time seeing how any one of them sticks, at least as a result of the convention.

P.S. Is it just me, or does the hall sound especially thuggish tonight. (Or does Rudy just have that affect on audiences?)

Related: Ways in Which the RNC Is Working, by Jonathan Chait

--Noam Scheiber