"You want your convention to be about why John Kerry should be president, not why Hillary Clinton is not speaking," he told the Times. "This will get fixed."

Speaking to CNN, Carville said: "Let me tell you, every campaign does dumb things. Some campaigns every now and then do a really dumb thing ... a really dumb thing. And John Kerry will get this fixed in 48 hours."

Supporters of the junior senator from New York have been pressing party officials to put her on the list of speakers, and added that several spent the day negotiating with convention organizers for a solution to the situation, party operatives told the Times.

Early in the day, Judith Hope, the former New York Democratic Party chairwoman, told the Times she would urge other female Democrats to boycott the convention unless Mrs. Clinton was allowed to speak.

Miss Hope, now the chairwoman of the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee, wrote an e-mail to reporters saying she was dismayed over the shunning of Mrs. Clinton, whom she described as "one of the most admired and articulate Democratic women in the country."

Later however, she backtracked, saying Mrs. Clinton's office had asked her not to go through with plans to organize a boycott.

"Senator Clinton's office has asked me to cease and desist," she told the Times. "I'll honor her wishes, and that's the last I'll have to say on the subject." However, the Times reported that she did send an e-mail message to at least 1,000 supporters urging them to protest the decision.

"If you are, like me, distressed by this news," she wrote, "I urge you to contact the Kerry-Edwards Campaign and the Democratic National Committee today and tell them that, without question, Hillary Clinton has earned a place on the podium and that this omission needs to be corrected immediately."

Clinton herself brushed off the controversy, saying that the party's decision to keep her off the podium claiming that decisions over who will have a prominent speaking role are "made based on a whole raft of issues."

On Wednesday she said that she was not upset that Democratic Party leaders had not given her a speaking role at the Convention.

According to the Times, "there has been widespread speculation about Mrs. Clinton's standing in the party since Mr. Kerry announced last week that his running mate would be John Edwards."

Many Democrats say the decision to keep Mrs. Clinton off the list of convention speakers suggests it was based on the idea that Edwards could be Mrs. Clinton's rival for the Democrat nomination in 2008 should President Bush be re-elected.

A recent Frank Luntz survey showed that as of June, Mrs. Clinton was still more popular than Kerry among Democrats, with 47 percent saying they wanted her to be their party's nominee, to Kerry's 44 percent.

Others, however, say its more likely that it was Clinton herself who chose not to have a prominent convention role, being reluctant to be too closely associated with what both she and her husband believe is a losing effort.

According to former Clinton political strategist Dick Morris, the Clintons will be privately rooting for President Bush to defeat Kerry this year so that Clinton can run in 2008 without having to challenge an incumbent Democrat president.

Rudy Giuliani, who was Mrs. Clinton's Senate opponent in 2000 until he dropped out of the race, earlier this week joked that he and Sen. Clinton have something in common: "We'll both be voting for President Bush this November."

Editor's note: