Perhaps the title of Dan Hicks' country song from 1969 puts it best: How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?

CNN's Scott Jennings sees the same problem for Democrats in their convention messaging. Last night, both Obamas showed up to sell a new version of 'Hope and Change.' Team Kamala promises to solve inflation, the border crisis, America's foreign policy, and more. But how do you sell a candidate as Hope and Change when she's been part of the status quo for nearly four years?

Democrats have controlled the White House 12 of the last 16 years and somehow everything is Trump’s fault.

That is the million dollar sentence and that’s what this whole race boils down to.

Democrats have nothing to run on besides orange man bad and that got old five years… pic.twitter.com/xksYt1gJgu

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) August 21, 2024

I should warn my fellow Republicans that we heard two of the greatest communicators in the country tonight. Now we had hulk a mania. The Democrats have Obama mania. They ripped the roof off of this place tonight. These democrats are fired up. They're not playing, okay? Yes, they say things that are exaggerations, they do say things about Trump and the Republicans that are outright lies, but the convention is working for Harris, at least as of today.

The gap that I still see in all these speeches, as good as they were, is that she's in the White House right now. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the last 16 years. And for all of the talk about division and the problems in the country and people are hurting, Democrats have mostly controlled this country.

Trump had it for four. The Obamas and Biden had it for the rest of the time. And somehow, it's still all Trump's fault, and somehow she hasn't been at the center of it. So to me, that's still the glaring hole in this campaign that hasn't yet been solved at the convention. How do you explain all of the problems that will be solved by the person who is currently in there for the last three and a half years who is supposed to already be working on solving it?

Republicans had stemwinders and high rhetorical moments too. Conventions are sugar highs for partisan messaging, doled out largely to the already addicted with little lasting political effect. At the end, they have the same issues that faced them before the conventions: their candidates, their platforms, and their messaging. As Jennings points out, Team Kamala's attempt to run as a change candidate makes her and the messaging entirely incoherent. 

How can we miss you when you won't go away?

That applies to the Obamas too. In this case, the Obamas' presence might actually make it tougher for Harris to succeed as a "change" candidate. Barack Obama actually did have a "change" program, as in "fundamentally change America," and his policies now have become the Democrat status quo. Joe Biden ran as Obama's third term, a return to the status quo ante before Donald Trump, and Harris was/is Biden's partner in that agenda. Harris is running as an extension of the Obama establishment, and even more so as an extension of Biden's current policy agenda. Even her much-vaunted ideas on economic policy were nothing more than a literal cut-and-paste from Bidenomics.

After the sugar high in Chicago wears off, voters will get left where they began -- in a status quo they despise, under an establishment they seriously disfavor. For instance, it's been a month now since Harris got anointed as Biden's replacement in election, and yet Americans still see the country moving in the wrong direction in near-record numbers, according to RCP's aggregation:

Those numbers were much closer during Trump's presidency, at least until the pandemic broke out. "Right direction" only dropped below 30% once in Trump's term before COVID-19; it hasn't been above 30% since December 2022. Voters consistently score the country as worse off under Biden and Harris, and until the sugar-high of her anointment, they consistently found Harris even worse. Harris is at 45.5/49.2 favorable for the moment, thanks to the first blush of campaigning, but as she continues to promote the status quo and defend the Biden record, those numbers will come down, especially in a competitive campaign.

The trick will be to remind voters that Harris is the status quo they hate, not the kind of change they seek. Tony Katz and I discussed this on his radio show today, when he asked me how Republicans can accomplish that. My answer: stick to the policies and the outcomes that Harris created as part of the Obama/Biden establishment status quo. Don't get too caught up in identitarian politics or what Tim Walz claimed on his military record. Stick to the failures of the Biden-Harris administration and make her answer for them, as well as her incoherent explanations of her policy proposals for the future. 

That's the big hole, and that's the big opportunity to make Kamala Harris go away ... and maybe the Obamas, too.