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The former president laid into Mitt Romney in a humorous take-down of his debate persona during an appearance in Las Vegas Tuesday.

As ever, Bill Clinton on a roll is a thing to behold. Maybe Obama should call him in as his debate coach. Via The Daily Dish.

Republicans seem thrilled the president's reelection campaign keeps bringing up Big Bird and the debate that bounced Romney into the lead in polls.

Bird Bird can't vote, and Sesame Workshop, which produces the show that features him, is not interested in being any more of a political football than it has to be.

"Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns," it said Tuesday in a statement after the Obama campaign released an ad that features the eight-feet-tall bird. "We have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice, have requested that the ad be taken down."

The Obama ad is reportedly only airing on national cable, not in any swing states, and has already been roundly mocked by team Romney as a sign of desperation and lack of ideas.

Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki was having none of it. "We understand that when your policy plan is a vapid collection of dusting off the Bush playbook on economic policies that would lead us to the same crisis we just have been going through, and embracing the extreme, out-of-the-mainstream foreign policy positions that have also caused us problems, as the Romney-Ryan team has, that you don't have a lot to talk about, you're going to attack us on Big Bird," she told Politico. "But you know, we're going to go back, and you'll hear the president today continue to lay out the choice and talk about all the substantive policy issues that we think people are making their decisions about."

Still, the timing on the spot is a bit off. Big Bird -- a topic Romney introduced into the conversation, not Obama -- was the story of the day after the debate, but by now attention has turned to Romney's foreign-policy speech. Which just goes to show that it's Romney who is still driving the debate, even this many days after it.

More importantly, the story is still about the debate -- Obama's worst campaign moment all year.

Gallup polling shows that two in three Americans watched the first presidential debate -- and 72 percent of them think Mitt Romney won it.

Somewhere, Newt Gingrich is saying, "I told you so."

The man who premised his much of his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination on the idea of taking on -- and taking out -- President Obama in a debate may not have won the nod, but he nonetheless predicted the ground on which Obama could best be fought.

"The job of the president is supposed to be to be competent and to be able to stand up for what he believes in and to be able to articulate what's wrong," Gingrich said on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. "Mitt Romney walked over him."

On that point, there is overwhelming consensus, according to a Gallup poll released Monday, which found that 72 percent of debate viewers believed Romney did a better job than Obama on Wednesday night. Only 20 percent gave the win to Obama. And while there was some partisan split in those numbers -- "Republicans were nearly unanimous in judging Romney the winner," the pollsters report -- Democrats also judged Romney the victor, 49 percent to 39 percent.

That's the strongest win Gallup has ever measured in its post-debate polling.

"Across all of the various debate-reaction polls Gallup has conducted, Romney's 52-point win is the largest Gallup has measured," the pollsters report. "The prior largest margin was 42 points for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 town hall debate."

Obama won the three 2008 debates against Senator John McCain, according to Gallup polling.

Big Bird is big. He is bigger than Mitt Romney. (Can you find No Apology near the check-out aisle at CVS? No? Well, you can find Bird Big DVDs there.) He is even, if you will, TOO BIG TO FAIL. Don't believe me? Check out some of the many, many images created by those whose love for the feathery Sesame Workshop character is as fierce as a three-year-old's attachment to a security blanket.

Birthers and truthers, meet the new kids in town: defenders of Big Bird.

I like Sesame Street... the trees are the right heights

-- Big Bird (@FiredBigBird) October 4, 2012

Move over birthers and truthers. There's a new constituency alighting on the colorful fringes of the presidential contest, and taking up a seat on its stoop. Defenders of Big Bird, the giant yellow costumed character from Sesame Street, are up in arms over Mitt Romney's remarks about this beloved feathered friend of small children, who has been entertaining and teaching Americans since today's middle-aged creative-class types were corduroys and turtlenecks. I say we call these defenders birders.

"I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS," Romney proclaimed at the debate. "I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. ... But I'm not going to -- I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That's number one."

The Twitterverse immediately coughed up the first big meme of the evening, a parody account called @FiredBigBird. On Thursday, @FiredElmo and @FiredOscar joined the pack, though all were subjected to Twitter suspensions.

The super PAC American Bridge, which is supporting Obama, quickly turned to Oscar the Grouch (R) to make a point about housing policy, while over at The Washington Post's "She the People" blog, writer Suzi Parker predicted the remarks about Big Bird would haunt Mitt Romney. "A survey in 2008 noted that 77 million Americans had watched Sesame Street as children. That's a lot of potential voters to woo. Nostalgia runs deep, trust me," she noted. "Big Bird, an iconic image, could serve as a bright yellow reminder that the Romney administration is keen on deep cuts to beloved institutions."

Obama quickly integrated a reference into his stump speech, telling supporters in Denver: "I mean, thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird. It's about time. We didn't know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit."

Though shown on public television, Sesame Street is produced by the Sesame Workshop, which is primarily funded by non-government sources.

"Sesame Workshop receives very, very little funding from PBS," the Sesame Workshop's Sherrie Westin, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, told CNN's Soledad O'Brien Thursday. "So, we are able to raise our funding through philanthropic, through our licensed product, which goes back into the educational programming, through corporate underwriting and sponsorship. So quite frankly, you can debate whether or not there should be funding of public broadcasting. But when they always try to tout out Big Bird, and say we're going to kill Big Bird -- that is actually misleading, because Sesame Street will be here."

Did the Drudge-driven brouhaha over Obama's "Quiet Riot" speech unsettle him before the debate? One conservative considers the question.

Reviewing the president's debate performance Wednesday night, David Frum asks:

Obama's performance was so disengaged that I was left to wonder: had that Daily Caller/Fox News tape got inside his head? Was he so determined not to look like an angry black man that he ended up looking ... kind of like a wimp?

Though he doesn't use the phrase, what Frum is really asking is whether or not Obama was reacting to something social scientists call "stereotype threat." The concept was laid out in 1999 in the pages of The Atlantic, in an article that discussed why black college students often struggle in academic environments more than would be predicted by their economic or educational background alone. Wrote Stanford University professor Claude M. Steele:

Some time ago I and two colleagues, Joshua Aronson and Steven Spencer, tried to see the world from the standpoint of these students, concerning ourselves less with features of theirs that might explain their troubles than with features of the world they see. A story I was told recently depicts some of these. The storyteller was worried about his friend, a normally energetic black student who had broken up with his longtime girlfriend and had since learned that she, a Hispanic, was now dating a white student. This hit him hard. Not long after hearing about his girlfriend, he sat through an hour's discussion of The Bell Curve in his psychology class, during which the possible genetic inferiority of his race was openly considered. Then he overheard students at lunch arguing that affirmative action allowed in too many underqualified blacks. By his own account, this young man had experienced very little of what he thought of as racial discrimination on campus. Still, these were features of his world. Could they have a bearing on his academic life?

My colleagues and I have called such features "stereotype threat" -- the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype. Everyone experiences stereotype threat. We are all members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist, from white males and Methodists to women and the elderly. And in a situation where one of those stereotypes applies -- a man talking to women about pay equity, for example, or an aging faculty member trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture -- we know that we may be judged by it.

Like the young man in the story, we can feel mistrustful and apprehensive in such situations. ...

With time he may weary of the extra vigilance these situations require and of what the psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major have called the "attributional ambiguity" of being on the receiving end of negative stereotypes. To reduce this stress he may learn to care less about the situations and activities that bring it about -- to realign his self-regard so that it no longer depends on how he does in the situation. We have called this psychic adjustment "disidentification." Pain is lessened by ceasing to identify with the part of life in which the pain occurs. This withdrawal of psychic investment may be supported by other members of the stereotype-threatened group -- even to the point of its becoming a group norm. But not caring can mean not being motivated. And this can have real costs. When stereotype threat affects school life, disidentification is a high price to pay for psychic comfort. Still, it is a price that groups contending with powerful negative stereotypes about their abilities -- women in advanced math, African-Americans in all academic areas -- may too often pay.

This concept -- disidentification -- is a fascinating one to consider in light of the question Frum posed. Applying this lens to Obama's debate performance, it's not just that a political figure was psyched out by the evening-before-game-day release of a potentially damaging mystery video, but rather that the release's power lay in the way it reintroduced the topic of race into the political contest. As Steele and his colleagues reported, in carefully designed psychological tests, stereotype threat was so powerful that it even "impaired intellectual functioning in a group unlikely to have any sense of group inferiority" -- young white men.

The tests also found that stereotype bias most impacted high-achieving minorities. "In all our research," wrote Steele, "the most achievement-oriented students, who were also the most skilled, motivated, and confident, were the most impaired by stereotype threat. This fact had been under our noses all along--in our data and even in our theory. A person has to care about a domain in order to be disturbed by the prospect of being stereotyped in it. That is the whole idea of disidentification -- protecting against stereotype threat by ceasing to care about the domain in which the stereotype applies."

Stereotype threat could also make students risk-averse, and overly focused on facts at the expense of concepts.

It's a long way from studies of undergraduates to theorizing about how the performance of the first black president of the United States might be affected by a right-wing push -- the night before his first re-election debate -- on a video of him speaking in a code-switching accent at a historically black university. (Do read this 2010 Slate piece on the topic, too -- it's really good). And there are plenty of other possible and plausible explanations for Obama's whiff. But if, like Frum, folks are going to ask the question, it's interesting to consider what we know from the social science literature on this topic, too.

Once again, the man who once captured the imaginations of millions delivered an emotionless appeal.

It was the most tweeted about political event of the year, and for once the insider tweets matched the television insta-polls: Mitt Romney was the decisive victor in the first presidential debate of this most contested and close of elections.

It was not so much that Romney was great, though he was smooth and personable, but that Obama was not. The president appeared snippy, his eyes flashing angrily during those infrequent moments when he looked at his opponent, his lips pursed and upturned when he looked down -- which was often -- as if he were trying to smile despite sucking on a particularly unpleasant hard candy. Republicans on Thursday morning were calling it a smirk, but it was more than that. There was, in the expression, a mixture of annoyance, impatience, and dislike. Either Obama couldn't stand looking at Romney, or he decided it was a better debating tactic to not even deign to consider him and to address hapless moderator Jim Lehrer and the audience instead of his challenger. The dynamic was set early on: Romney looked at Obama, and Obama looked down or at the moderator. His words appeared equally downbeat.

All of which made me wonder anew about Obama's convention performance, and to what an extent it was not anomalous but intentional and characteristic. I wrote then:

Barack Obama will never be that man again. Whoever he was in 2008, and 2004, Barack Obama will never have his easy swagger and rambunctiously playful enthusiasm ....

That is the truth at the core of his oddly flat convention speech, and at the center of his technically skilled but strangely bloodless reelection campaign. Whoever Obama was when he was elected president has been seared away by two active wars, the more free-ranging fight against al-Qaeda, the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, and the endless grinding fights with Washington Republicans -- and even, I am sure, activists in his own party.

It seemed even truer last night. Would Obama have gotten so significant a convention bounce if it were just about his own speech? His demeanor in Denver made me wonder if his was not in some important sense a borrowed bounce, bequeathed to him by Bill Clinton.

Many are writing this morning that Obama seemed unprepared, but that's hardly credible. He did not stumble over answers or forget his talking points. Rather, he appeared badly prepared by his handlers to pursue a strategy of non-engagement with Romney while aiming to deliver a passable, above-the-fray presentation. It was a classic frontrunner strategy -- first, do no harm -- but it flopped because Romney was so eager to engage, and chose the occasion of the first debate to showcase a classic Romney policy pivot.

If you reread the pre-debate expectations-setting coverage, it appears Obama did exactly what he was gunning to do:

Obama is not particularly fluid in sound bites, so his team is aiming for a workmanlike performance like his speech at the Democratic convention.

That New York Times piece mentioned something else important to consider:

As the candidates prepare, the first trick for Mr. Obama is finding time. His rehearsals have started late and ended early because of events like the tumult in the Middle East. He showed up at one practice just after speaking at a ceremony for the four Americans killed in Libya, and aides found that his mind was elsewhere.

I said it after the convention speech and I'll say it again: If there's something that seems shut down in our once ebulliently optimistic president, it most likely has to do with the wars. Obama is a naturally empathic individual, whose diverse, mobile, international background made him unusually able when it came to assessing new social situations and reading more than people say. Some observers have speculated that Obama needs a crowd, energy he can draw from. But he had that aplenty in Charlotte, and it barely helped. I suspect a more prosaic explanation: A person of his temperament cannot maintain the same open demeanor when he's dealing with war and death all the time. As, we must recall, Obama has been for years now. If Obama seems shut down, perhaps it is because he has to be to be who he is and do the job he needs to do day in and day out. If his heart didn't seem in it last night, I wonder if it's not in part because the last thing he needs to consider in his work on a day-to-day basis is his heart. It's a long way from being a community organizer, civil-rights lawyer and anti-war state senator to running a drone war that kills innocent civilians, ordering the death of militants, overseeing a policy that's led to an increase in American casualties in Afghanistan, and delivering funereal remarks at a ceremony honoring the returning remains of a slain American diplomat.

It's the only explanation I can come up with for why there is so much self-abnegation in Obama's campaigning. Does it do anything for any sort of voter to hear this, from Obama's closing remarks last night?

You know, four years ago I said that I'm not a perfect man and I wouldn't be a perfect president. And that's probably a promise that Governor Romney thinks I've kept. But I also promised that I'd fight every single day on behalf of the American people and the middle class and all those who are striving to get in the middle class. I've kept that promise and if you'll vote for me, then I promise I'll fight just as hard in a second term.

The emphasis on imperfection, the almost apologetic tone -- it's something that's come and gone in Obama's messaging since before the Republican take-over in 2010.

Romney has had the luxury of being able to campaign undistracted by a day job. More importantly, he's been able to campaign undistracted by dealing with anything substantive or difficult in recent years. Campaigns are physically taxing. But the toll of being president is something different again.

His supporters keep wanting Obama to be who he was in 2008. But that's not who he is anymore.

The first presidential debate will cover weighty matters. But it will also have a lot of predictable throat-clearing and posturing. Here are some examples.

Every great debate has its share of stock phrases and generic pleasantries that debaters trot out for the sake of politeness or as they stall for time and gather their thoughts. Don't be surprised tonight if you hear:

"That's a great a question, Jim..."

"With all due respect..."

"I'm so glad you asked..."

"During my time as governor..." (Romney)

"Let me be clear..." (Obama)

"An extraordinary...." (Romney)

"I'll answer the second part first..."

"But first, let me address what my opponent just said..."

"Let me finish..."

What are some of the other debating tropes and stock phrases you've noticed? What non-policy words and phrases do Obama and Romney always use (and we're not talking a/the/and/etc. here)? Leave your predictions for the most predictable ones in the comments, below.

A swing-state advertisement suggests Romney will get rid of the mortgage interest deduction, the child care tax credit and tax savings for college tuition.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- It was announced on Sept. 19 as another Obama television advertisement targeting women voters, and generated little notice. In reality, "Pay The Bills" is a devastating swing-state spot that memorably raises the specter of Romney taking away some of the most treasured -- and valuable -- tax perks of middle class voters, vastly raising their federal taxes every year and threatening their ability to save for their children.

"To fund his tax cuts for millionaires, Romney could take away middle-class deductions for child care, home mortgages, and college tuition," the spot says.

I came across the spot while grabbing a quick bite before teaching in Clarendon last week; it has been in rotation on the air in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, according to the Obama campaign.

And, boy, it is attention-grabbing. The mortgage-interest deduction is especially important to middle class families -- and singles -- in communities with high housing prices, such as Northern Virginia. So far the spot has also gathered more than 300,000 views on YouTube.

Politifact has evaluated the claims in the spot and rated them "Mostly False," mainly because Romney's proposals are too vague to evaluate thoroughly. Romney has rejected the conclusions of the Tax Policy Center, cited in the ad, that he would be unable to cut taxes for the wealthy and the deficit as much as he has promised without also getting rid of much-beloved middle-class tax perks. "They made an assumption that I would reduce the home mortgage-interest deduction," he's told Fortune. "I will not do that for middle-income taxpayers."

From a political standpoint, what's going on here is clear: We are watching the inversion of the tradition anti-tax script by Democrats, who are now casting the Republican GOP presidential nominee as the man who will increase middle-class taxes.

"Mitt Romney, he's so focused on big business and tax cuts for the wealthy, it's seems like his answers to middle-class America are just tough, tough luck," says the female narrator of the spot.

And Republicans are playing into the trap with a mixture of vagueness and complaints about the 47 percent who do not pay federal income taxes -- an echo of the Tea Party-fostered demand that all Americans begin to pay federal income taxes, even if only $10 a year, as Michele Bachmann proposed earlier this year.

On CBS's 60 Minutes last weekend, Romney was pressed on the issue and gave up an opportunity to be clear with voters.

"What are we talking about, the mortgage deduction, the charitable deduction?" Scott Pelley asked.

"The devil's in the details. The angel is in the policy, which is creating more jobs," Romney replied.

"You have heard the criticism, I'm sure, that your campaign can be vague about some things. And I wonder if this isn't precisely one of those things?" Pelley pressed.

Instead of using the interview to say no, he would not eliminate the popular mortgage-interest deduction, Romney made a process point: "It's very much consistent with my experience as a governor which is, if you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don't hand them a complete document and say, 'Here, take this or leave it.'"

Nor did he do himself much good when he told a presumably middle-class audience in Kent, Ohio, Wednesday, "By the way, don't be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I'm also going to get rid of deductions and exemptions."

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has stuck to its message.

Romney would "[r]aise taxes on the middle class by cutting deductions like those for mortgage interest, children, and charitable contributions to pay for $250,000 tax cuts for multi-millionaires," Obama campaign spokesman Danny Kanner reiterated in a statement earlier this week.

It will be interesting to see if this argument comes up -- and how it's handled -- during the first presidential debate next week.

Presidential elections are decided in the first-person plural and the second person. Anyone operating in the third person is in trouble.

Mitt Romney's campaign on Wednesday released an ad featuring the candidate speaking straight to the camera, all by himself: It's not the most polished video in the world. But you can see the thinking behind it. The candidate will directly address the voters, making a spare, authentic, heart-to-heart appeal that he cares about how "too many Americans" are suffering.

And then he says it.

"President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families. The difference is my policies will make things better for them."

Them.

Mitt Romney keeps talking about the people whose votes he needs as "them."

In the 47 percent video, it was "those people."

"I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," Romney said.

But presidential elections are always about the grand national us. They are about we, the people. And when it come to a candidate, they are about me and you.

As Bill Clinton famously said, "For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us."

That statement elides a lot of social divisions, but Clinton was right that as a matter of politics that's how you have to talk win. Even George W. Bush ran as "a uniter, not a divider."

The problem with Romney's campaign is not just a secret video, or media- and PAC-hyped candidate gaffes. It's an approach to talking to and about people in a way that is othering, rather than empathetic -- so much so that in direct appeal to middle-class voters, Romney doesn't think to say (or, rather, no one on his campaign thinks to have him say), "The difference is my policies will make things better for you."

The vast majority of Americans identify as middle-class or working class.

If Romney wasn't talking to them in this spot -- and by his language he made clear that he was not -- who was he talking to?

The Republican presidential candidate joined the former president in New York to extol the power of free trade and private investment to defang radicalism abroad.

NEW YORK -- It was definitely one of the stranger moments in Campaign 2012. Bill Clinton, the man who more than any other helped turn the presidential contest away from Mitt Romney, welcomed him on the stage Tuesday morning at the Sheraton New York Hotel for his annual Clinton Global Initiative conference, where Romney was the featured morning speaker.

Was it going to be a set-up? And if so, for whom? Was Romney going to make a dig at President Obama at the conference hosted by the Big Dog himself? Or would Clinton deftly use the appearance to create a contrast between the former governor and the president, as well as media anticipation for his own moment on the stage with Romney? In many ways, it seemed a natural audience for Romney -- the wealthy former corporate leader, come to talk to a community of his own -- and the appearance drew so many members of the New York and national press the ballroom reached capacity and spilled out into overflow press rooms.

In the end, it turned out not to be that awkward. The wizened, lean, former president, a few inches shorter than Romney, warmly welcomed the robust former Massachusetts governor, barely a year his junior, thanking him for his support for the nonprofit City Year program, a public-private partnership that began in Boston and which the Clinton Administration used in the early 1990s as a model for the national AmeriCorps youth service program.

Calling Clinton's introduction "very touching," Romney quipped: "If there's one thing we've learned in this election season, by the way, it is that a few words from Bill Clinton can do a man a lot of good."

The audience laughed appreciatively.

"All I gotta do now is wait a couple of days for that bounce to happen," Romney continued. "... One of the best things that can happen to any cause, to any people, is to have Bill Clinton as its advocate."

Romney's remarks hit three major points. The main one, and most obvious reason for his appearance, was a discussion of how to do public-private aid ventures in the third world through something he called "Prosperity Pacts." It sounded in many ways like Romney's prescription for the U.S. economy -- free enterprise and free markets and private investment would all lead to job creation overseas, he said, strengthening developing nations. Along with humanitarian aid and the pursuit of strategic diplomatic and military interests, it was the major justification for U.S. foreign assistance, Romney said.

The heart of his remarks was a paean to the power of work to defang fanaticism, especially in the Middle East, where, he said, youth unemployment was a major problem:

Work has to be at the heart of our efforts to help people build economies that can create jobs, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem. It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work does not long tolerate corruption nor will it quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hard-working men and women. To foster work and enterprise in the Middle East and other developing countries I will initiate something I will call Prosperity Pacts, working with the private sector the program will identify the barriers to investment and trade and entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. And, in exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade, developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property rights ....

The aim of a much larger share of our aid must be the promotion of work, and the fostering of free enterprise. Nothing we can do as a nation will change lives and nations more effectively and permanently than sharing the insight that lies at the foundation of America's own economy, and that is that free people pursuing happiness in their own ways, build a strong and prosperous nation.

Romney also found time to zing Obama on his handling of the tumult in the Middle East, saying that America has found itself "at the mercy of events rather than shaping events."

"A lot of Americans, including myself, are ... troubled by developments in the Middle East," he said, listing four examples: "Syria has witnessed the killing of tens of thousands of people. The president of Egypt is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our ambassador to Libya was assassinated in a terrorist attack. Iran is moving towards nuclear-weapons capability."

The administration had hesitated to call the attack a terrorist one.

And Romney appeared to be walking away from an analysis of the causes of difference between nations that had been a part of his stump speech since at least 2007. That take got him into trouble during a visit to Israel this summer, when he attributed Israel's economic strength when compared to Palestinian Authority-governed areas to its culture, offending some Palestinian leaders. Romney's new version of his historic riff also excised references to authors Jared Diamond and David Landes, whom Romney had been citing for years as the source of his thinking on the comparative wealth of nations; Diamond objected to Romney's interpretation of his work in August, writing in a New York Times piece that Romney "misrepresented my views." Said Romney in New York:

When I was in business, I traveled to a number of other countries. I was often struck by the vast difference in wealth among nations that were sometimes neighbors. Some of that was of course due to geography. Rich nations often had natural resources like mineral deposits or access to waterways for transportation. But in some case, all that seemed to separate a rich country from a more poor one was a faint line on the map. Countries that were physically right next door to each other were in some cases economically worlds apart. You can think of North Korea and South Korea. I became convinced that the critical difference between these countries wasn't geography. I noticed that the most successful countries shared something in common: They were the freest. They protected the rights of individuals. They enforced the rule of law. They encouraged trade and enterprise. They understood that economic freedom is the only force in history that has consistently lifted people out of poverty, and kept people out of poverty.

Wrapping his remarks, Romney took a swipe at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who'd appeared at the United Nations just across town on Monday and raised hackles by saying that Israel would be "eliminated" in the long run because it lacked the regional roots in the Middle East that Iran has.

"We should not forget, we cannot forget, that not far from here a voice of unspeakable evil and hatred has spoken out, threatening Israel and the entire civilized world," Romney said. "But we come together knowing that the bitterness of hate is no match for the strength of love."

And with that, and a bit of boilerplate, Romney concluded.

Clinton shook Romney's hand. The governor left the stage. Clinton turned back to the podium, saying to the audience flatly, "Thank you, governor." He looked down at the podium and shuffled his notes.

Obama's post-convention bounce showed what could happen if the national campaigns addressed the entire nation as a matter of course.

Detail from "The Apotheosis of Washington," U.S. Capitol rotunda (GreatSeal.com)

One of the less outrage-generating turns of phrase in Mitt Romney's secretly recorded May remarks in Boca Raton involved his campaign's state-by-state strategy.

"Florida will be one of those states that is the key state," he told the assembled big-dollar donors at the fundraiser. "And so all the money will get spent in 10 states, and this is one of them."

It's a remark that's gotten almost no attention, because it fits so perfectly with the conventional wisdom of this election cycle: Only nine or 10 key swing states matter. "The 2012 election is likely to go down in history as the one in which the most money was spent reaching the fewest people," the New York Times' Jeremy Peters aptly summarized the campaigns' approach in June, discussing their effort "to reach just 1.4 million registered voters" in nine states.

But as anyone with any sense of American media today knows, this is not how culture and opinion get created in a massive, populous, and networked country. Sure, if you want to sell regional futon ads, you go to your local community paper or alternative weekly. But if you want to promote a major cultural happening, you make damn sure thought leaders in the major creative capitals of the country buy in to what is going on.

The American people may be separated by geography, but they're not nearly as isolated from each others' opinions as they were even a dozen years ago. They have Facebook friends across the country, even the world. Social sharing and online video sites mean that nothing stays isolated for long, and the distinctive worldviews of specific micro-communities can crash against wildly different ones with shocking rapidity. That's what happened when a group of mysterious filmmakers in California put together an anti-Muslim flim clip -- which went on to roil the Middle East once it was translated and shared online in Egypt and elsewhere. Negative local news stories become national and even international ones with a speed and power that have upended the old rules of politics. This has been going on a while now.

The opinion-creation complex goes the other way, too. Many of those who read newspapers read the Washington Post and the New York Times online rather than their faded regional publications; the vast majority of online news audiences for these major publications lives outside the traditional geographic boundaries of the papers. "The Washington Post circulates in print only around Washington, D.C., but way over 90 percent -- I think over 95 percent of our Internet audience is outside Washington, D.C.," Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham told a technology conference in July.

Obama can move his base from Washington, the Pew Forum on Religious Life found in August. While there was little evidence that the president was able to change public opinion around the country by coming out for gay marriage, there was a strong suggestion in the polling data that he was able to move Democrats since announcing his newly "evolved" position in May:

Obama's announcement may have rallied the Democratic base -- particularly liberal Democrats -- to the issue. Democrats supported gay marriage by a 59% to 31% margin in April -- that stands at 65% to 29% today. Most of this shift has come among liberal Democrats, 83% of whom now support gay marriage, up from 73% earlier this year. Attitudes have not shifted among any other segment of the public following Obama's announcement ....

Similarly, the well-programmed three-day Democratic National Convention in Charlotte earlier this month seems to have taken care of the Democrats' problem with its base, successfully firing up the rank-and-file. Nate Silver reported that polls since the convention show a decline in the enthusiasm gap between the parties. As the Daily Caller described a Fox News poll showing the same:

Asked in August how important it was that the candidate they supported won the election, 64 percent of Romney supporters called it extremely important, compared to just 54 percent of Obama supporters. Thirty-seven percent of Obama supporters called it "very important," as did 28 percent of Romney supporters. Ads by Google

But in the days following the convention -- Fox News polled from Sept. 9 through Sept. 11 -- 62 percent of Obama supporters said it was "extremely important" that the president be re-elected. The percentage of Romney supporters saying his victory was "extremely important" didn't budge.

The latest numbers suggest that Obama supporters were excited enough by the Democratic convention to help close the enthusiasm gap that has existed for several months.

It sounds obvious to say it, but Obama's blue-state base can be reached through blue-state communications channels. His base is the people who live in cities and who live in cultural communities that talk to each other, Chicago to New York to Charlotte to Miami to Los Angeles. And its enthusiasm can be infectious, transforming the narrative of the contest. If Obama can call his one-time supporters off the sidelines in blue states, and get them donating and chattering and creating free media and signing up to volunteer at near 2008 levels, he can change perceptions of his candidacy in purple states -- and even red ones. Romney could benefit as well from targeting blue voters in blue states -- because if he can get some of them on his side, he can use their cultural power to woo that central, centrist 5 to 10 percent he needs to win and which has continued to elude him.

But it means recognizing that we are not a conservative America and a liberal America, but a United States of America. Obama knew that in 2004. He knew it in 2008.

But this year, somehow, neither side of the aisle seems to remember.

At Harvard Law School, the first black editor of the law review struggled with what he called "frustrating" arguments about language.

PBS's "Frontline" news show is previewing a series on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney online right now, and as part of that posting what they're calling "'The Artifacts of Character,' a series of rarely seen objects that elucidate key moments and experiences in the candidates' lives." One fascinating entry is a 1994 speech by the then-young attorney Obama on the importance of community organizing. The whole thing is worth a read, but this passage -- about political correctness and editing -- in particular will seem familiar to anyone who has worked at a university publication in the past 20 years:

I know that at Harvard, one of the most frustrating things about student life at Harvard was, I guess, what's called political correctness in the media. Now political correctness, I tend not to -- I tend not to be that sympathetic to people who cry about political correctness and complain about, you know, the liberals and the minorities who are giving conservatives a hard time. You know, I think that there's nothing wrong with giving somebody a hard time if they're being insensitive to other people's feelings, if they're being rude, if they're telling racist jokes, if they're telling sexist jokes. I don't think that there is anything wrong with telling them where they're wrong.

But I do think that what's happened in a place like Harvard and maybe happens less so here, is that young people tend to jump with both feet on a whole lot of symbolic issues. I remember when I was organizing at Harvard, when I was the manager of the Law Review at Harvard, I had a young black woman come in to me and complain vehemently about the fact that the word "black" was not capitalized in an article. Whereas she felt that "black" should be capitalized because that would show more respect for the black community.

And then, you know, a white editor came in. He started complaining, "Why should black be capitalized when white is not capitalized?" Now this seems like a ridiculous argument, but this is the kind of thing that a lot of students, groups, a lot of well-meaning idealists spend their time on. I think there are a lot of academics that spend their time on it. I'm not sure that's really useful. I think it's a matter of symbols and not substance. And I think it indicates our willingness to try to, instead of making the sacrifices that are required to really bring about changes, I think it's an indication of our sense of powerlessness, that we just complain about things, that we pick at small issues, instead of taking on and really engaging the major issues that face our country right now.

When people can speak and assemble as they choose, anything can happen -- in our country, and in others.

So let me get this straight: A washed up softcore porn director and an Egyptian Coptic Christian emigre on probation for financial crimes after becoming a federal informant put together a movie trailer in California that gets translated into Arabic, sparking a firestorm of anti-Western protests in more than a dozen nations and leading to the death of a U.S. Ambassador and two former Navy Seals, as well as widespread assaults on U.S. embassies, all the while the election to be the most powerful man in the world hangs in the balance. And the film is initially blamed on the Jews.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

The big questions that remain: Who put up the money for the movie? And how does the U.S. get out of this mess?

Updated 3:53 p.m.

If you weren't following this story closely as it developed over the past day and woke to news of the murder of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and a group of swirling charges around the U.S. response to September 11 protests against the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, here's who said what and when (all times are Eastern Standard):

7/1/12. Self-described California real-estate developer and self-described Israeli Jew Sam Bacile releases a 13-minute trailer for "The Real Life of Muhammad," an amateurishly produced anti-Islam movie allegedly made with donations from 100 Jews. (Serious questions have been raised about details of Bacile's identity as he has described it to reporters, as well as whether there is any full length film at all.)

9/9/12. The Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, condemns the film, word of which has reached Cairo, pointing a finger at "the actions undertaken by some extremist Copts who made a film offensive to the Prophet." Coptic Christians are the largest religious minority in Egypt, and American Coptic activist Morris Sadek was involved in promoting the film, which shows Christians being attacked by Muslims. "The attack on religious sanctities does not fall under this freedom," he said of freedom of speech, according to reports in English-language Arab media outlets.

9/10/12. Florida Rev. Terry Jones releases a YouTube announcing he'll screen Bacile's anti-Islam trailer as part of turning the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America into "International Judge Mohammad 'Mo' Day."

In June, Jones hanged Obama in effigy at his Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, leading to a Secret Service investigation. He's best known for his threat to burn Korans to mark the Sept. 11 anniversary, which sparked protests in Afghanistan in 2010 and led Gen. David Petraeus to warn ABC News that Jones's plan could "endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort here," and then burning a Koran in 2011, leading to riots in Afghanistan.

5:53 a.m., 9/11/12. Shortly before noon local time, @USEmbassyCairo tweets: "Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy," according to a screenshot captured by @NYCSouthpaw.

6:11 a.m., 9/11/12. @USEmbassyCairo tweets: "US Embassy condemns religious incitement" with a link to a statement, according to another @NYCSouthpaw screenshot. The statement "U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious Incitement" was posted on the Embassy of the United States Cairo, Egypt website in response to Egyptian media accounts of the film, though without a specific time-stamp:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

Selected sentences from the statement were also tweeted out by embassy staff.

11 a.m. 9/11/12. At 5 p.m. local time in Cairo, demonstrators begin to assemble outside the U.S. Embassy. According to an Egyptian newspaper, "Roughly 2000 Salafist activists answered a call on Tuesday by Wesam Abdel-Wareth, a Salafist leader and president of Egypt's Hekma television channel, to protest 'Muhammad's Trial' - a US-made film which, critics say, insults Islam's Prophet Mohammed - at 5pm in front of the US embassy in Cairo." (h/t Matt Vasilogambros) According to the New York Times:

In Cairo, thousands of unarmed protesters had gathered outside the American embassy during the day. By nightfall, some had climbed over the wall around the embassy compound and destroyed a flag hanging inside. The vandals replaced it with a black flag favored by ultraconservatives and militants and labeled with the most basic Islamic profession of faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet." Embassy guards fired guns into the air, but a large contingent of Egyptian riot police officers on hand to protect the embassy evidently did not use their weapons against the crowd, and the protest continued, largely without violence, into the night.

4:47 p.m., 9/11/12. @USEmbassyCairo tweets: "As Spokesperson Nuland said, protestors breached our wall and took down flag. Thanks for your concern and kind wishes."

5:58-59 p.m., 9/11/12. @USEmbassyCairo tweets in three parts: "1) Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. 2) Of course we condemn breaches of our compound, we're the ones actually living through this. 3) Sorry, but neither breaches of our compound or angry messages will dissuade us from defending freedom of speech AND criticizing bigotry."

6 p.m., 9/11/12. Stand Up America Now begins a livestream of Jones' anti-Muslim presentation online.

6:30 p.m., 9/11/12. @USEmbassyCairo tweets: "This morning's condemnation (issued before protests began) still stands. As does condemnation of unjustified breach of the Embassy." This tweet is later deleted.

7:51 p.m., 9/11/12. Reuters, citing Libyan government sources, reports "An American staff member of the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi has died following fierce clashes at the compound."

10:09 p.m., 9/11/12. The Romney campaign releases a statement "embargoed until midnight tonight" from Mitt Romney condemning the administration and the attacks: "I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." The U.S. Embassy statement from Cairo was issued before the attack in Libya.

10:10 p.m. 9/11/12 Politico cites an unnamed administration official saying, "The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government."

10:25 p.m., 9/11/12.The Romney campaign lifts the embargo on its statement, which now comes on a day historically seen as a time to refrain from the most pointed forms of political combat, in honor of those who died.

10:38-39 p.m., 9/11/12. @StateDept tweets: " #SecClinton: I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi today. http://state.gov #Libya" and "#SecClinton: We have confirmed one @StateDept officer was killed in #Libya. We are heartbroken by this terrible loss." Hillary Clinton issues a statement, saying, "I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi today. As we work to secure our personnel and facilities, we have confirmed that one of our State Department officers was killed. We are heartbroken by this terrible loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and those who have suffered in this attack." She adds: "Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind."

11:51 p.m., 9/11/12. BuzzFeed reports that the U.S. Embassy in Cairo has deleted its earlier tweets of the statement that remains on the embassy website.

12:01 am, 9/12/12.: The chairman of the Republican National Committee waits until one minute after the end of the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, then tweets:

Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt.Sad and pathetic.

— Reince Priebus (@Reince) September 12, 2012

12:09 a.m., 9/12/12. Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt emails reporters a response to Romney's statement: "We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack."

7:21 a.m., 9/12/12. President Obama condemns the attacks in Libya, confirming that the U.S. ambassador was slain:

I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Right now, the American people have the families of those we lost in our thoughts and prayers. They exemplified America's commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe, and stand in stark contrast to those who callously took their lives.

I have directed my Administration to provide all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya, and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe. While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.

On a personal note, Chris was a courageous and exemplary representative of the United States. Throughout the Libyan revolution, he selflessly served our country and the Libyan people at our mission in Benghazi. As Ambassador in Tripoli, he has supported Libya's transition to democracy. His legacy will endure wherever human beings reach for liberty and justice. I am profoundly grateful for his service to my Administration, and deeply saddened by this loss.

The brave Americans we lost represent the extraordinary service and sacrifices that our civilians make every day around the globe. As we stand united with their families, let us now redouble our own efforts to carry their work forward.

9:57-10:05 a.m., 9/12/12. Saying "our hearts break" over each State Department loss, Hillary Clinton said in remarks at the department, "We condemn in the strongest terms this senseless act of violence." "Because of this tragedy we have new heroes to honor and more friends to mourn," she said, later asking the question that will be on many minds today: "How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?" It was, she said, "confounding." But we must be "clear-eyed in our grief," she said: "This was an attack by a small and savage group, not the people or government of Libya." Defending the American traditions of religious tolerance and free speech, she added: "Let me be clear: There is no justification for this. None." Full Clinton statement.

10:16, 9/12/12. Mitt Romney speaks from Jacksonville, Florida, calling the attacks in Libya "outrageous and disgusting" but doubling down on his criticism of the Obama administration for the U.S. Embassy to Egypt statement, saying it "sent mixed messages to the world." "I think it's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values," Romney said. Full Romney remarks.

9/12/12. Obama speaks from Washington, D.C., with Secretary Clinton by his side. "The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack," Obama said. "We're working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats. I've also directed my administration to increase our security at diplomatic posts around the world. And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people." He affirmed that, "Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." And he echoed Clinton's remarks, saying, "There is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence. None."

Full Obama statement.

As Twitter exploded last night with talk about this extraordinary New York Times Op-Ed detailing how "The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001," The Washington Post's Dan Eggen tweeted at TNR's Alec MacGillis a reminder of Rudy Giuliani's #headdesking statement on Jan. 8, 2010: "We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."

That got me thinking about the old Rudy G., in his "America's Mayor" incarnation, when his steady leadership of a grieving, rattled city made him a hero to New Yorkers -- and the nation. I was too busy working on 9/11 -- standing around at the edge of Lafayette Square in D.C. with a bunch of evacuated White House staffers and members of the press, waiting for something to happen, then running down rumors of attack sites within the city while smoke rose in the distance from the Pentagon hit -- to see Giuliani's news conferences or much television that day. And in that pre-YouTube era, what you missed on live TV was pretty much gone unless someone replayed it. But his earliest remarks are all on YouTube now, and show his extraordinary steadiness on that day. Worth a watch if you have the time.

9:50 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001:

2:38 p.m.

Full afternoon news conference, part 1:

Part 2:

10 p.m.

There are some people who have personalities that make them shine during tough times, but who are too tough for softer ones. New York was lucky it had one of them at the helm when it needed it most.

The president's solid but not wildly uplifting speech in Charlotte provided a glimpse into how he's changed since he took office.

CHARLOTTE -- Barack Obama will never be that man again. Whoever he was in 2008, and 2004, Barack Obama will never have his easy swagger and rambunctiously playful enthusiasm. "I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention," Obama told the thickly-packed crowd at the Time Warner Arena. "The times have changed -- and so have I."

That is the truth at the core of his oddly flat convention speech, and at the center of his technically skilled but strangely bloodless reelection campaign. Whoever Obama was when he was elected president has been seared away by two active wars, the more free-ranging fight against al-Qaeda, the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, and the endless grinding fights with Washington Republicans -- and even, I am sure, activists in his own party.

"I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president," the president said in the later half of his speech, to enormous applause. "And that means I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return. I've shared the pain of families who've lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who've lost their jobs. If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them. And while I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'"

It was, perhaps, the most personal passage in speech otherwise heavy on policy promises and talk of past accomplishments and the long road ahead. It was a substantive speech, but so substantive it at times seemed like the sort of thing he could give before an audience of interested experts at the Brookings Institution, rather than something designed to motivate voters to the polls (even as it explicitly asked for their vote).

"As I stand here tonight, I have never been more hopeful about America," Obama said. "Not because I think I have all the answers. Not because I'm naïve about the magnitude of our challenges. I'm hopeful because of you."

But he didn't sound hopeful. He sounded worn out, maybe a little sad, keenly aware of all that was undone, singed by the clamorous voices of an America in need and the devastating toll of two wars on troops whose injuries he, as commander-in-chief, can too clearly see. Rather than the bearer of hopes, he sounded like a man looking for reasons to hope.

"I think about the young sailor I met at Walter Reed hospital, still recovering from a grenade attack that would cause him to have his leg amputated above the knee. Six months ago, we would watch him walk into a White House dinner honoring those who served in Iraq, tall and 20 pounds heavier, dashing in his uniform, with a big grin on his face; sturdy on his new leg. And I remember how a few months after that I would watch him on a bicycle, racing with his fellow wounded warriors on a sparkling spring day, inspiring other heroes who had just begun the hard path he had traveled," Obama said.

"He gives me hope. He gives me hope."

Obama rode into office as an anti-war president. But tonight, on stage, he was very much a war president.

And if anything came through in his remarks, it is that he is also a war-weary one. The civilian head of the U.S. military, Obama has had a window into all the death and destruction we hear measured out -- and much that we will never know of.

"In a world of new threats and new challenges, you can choose leadership that has been tested and proven," Obama said, in the passage in his speech that first saw a glint of energy. "Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. And we have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead."

Think about what he's seen since the heady days of "Yes We Can" that is packed into that one paragraph.

"We have a choice," the president added later. "My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy, but from all that we've seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly."

It was in the foreign-policy section of the speech that he seemed most to come alive, beginning to riff from his prepared remarks and seemingly enjoying tweaking his opponent.

"You don't call Russia our number one enemy -- and not al-Qaeda -- unless you're still stuck in a Cold War mind warp. You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally. My opponent said it was 'tragic' to end the war in Iraq, and he won't tell us how he'll end the war in Afghanistan. Well I have, and I will," said Obama.

"And while my opponent would spend more money on military hardware that our Joint Chiefs don't even want, I'll use the money we're no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work -- rebuilding roads and bridges; and schools and runways. After two wars that have cost us thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, it's time to do some nation-building right here at home."

If it was a familiar argument -- the 2003-2004 Democratic primary presidential contest talking about nation-building beginning at home quite a bit -- it is in part because we have been embroiled in war now for so very long.

On the final night of a well-orchestrated, but far from flawless, nominating convention, Obama did not bring the noise. He brought himself. Not a candidate, but a president -- for good and for ill.

The Massachusetts Senate candidate answers Republicans' refrain of success with a plea for fairness.

CHARLOTTE -- Is there anything people will remember about Wednesday night at the 2012 DNC other than Bill Clinton's 48-minute stem-winder repudiating the Republican economic record of the past three decades and the Romney-Ryan campaign's attacks on Barack Obama, while revealing to all concerned that he is the referee in the American political system that Democrats have been dying for the media to become?

Maybe not. But before Clinton came out, Massachusetts' Democratic candidate for Senate Elizabeth Warren spoke. She was the one of only two speakers during the pre-Clinton heart of the evening to put some fire into the crowd, following a parade of mid-Atlantic elected officials who proved their region to be home to some of the most moderated and low-key voices in the contemporary Democratic Party; several overmatched Big Box business leaders who tried gamely to get a rise from the crowd; a group of "real people" who spoke with a typical mix of passion and awkwardness; and birth-control funding advocate Sandra Fluke.

But speak Warren did, a mix of grandmotherly concern and rounded Oklahoma vowels on a night whose broad themes appeared to be the white-working class and women voters.

"People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: they're right. The system is rigged," she said. "Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs -- the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs -- still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do."

Proving the advantage of having your party's convention come second, she responded directly to the theme of success laid out again and again in Tampa.

"These folks don't resent that someone else makes more money. We're Americans. We celebrate success," she said. However, she continued in her folksy way: "We just don't want the game to be rigged."

And she echoed what's clearly a theme of this convention as much as the invocation of "forward": the idea that this race is about who we are in America, and that our very identity is at stake in it.

Thanks to progressives, "We started to take children out of factories and put them in schools. We began to give meaning to the words 'consumer protection' by making our food and medicine safe. And we gave the little guys a better chance to compete by preventing the big guys from rigging the markets. We turned adversity into progress because that's what we do."

It was a speech that worked well on a night that, before Bill Clinton, was a bit of a snooze. But it turns out that Clinton isn't just a tough act to follow -- he's a tough act to share any part of an evening with, so thoroughly does he dominate the stage.

First Lady Michelle Obama delicately eviscerated the Romney family in a thunderously well-received convention speech.

CHARLOTTE -- Combining the star wattage of a wildly popular first lady, the skills of a now-seasoned political pro, and the carefully curated stories of real people, Michelle Obama on Tuesday knocked it out of the park during her Democratic National Convention speech.

Those who are fans of the first lady will doubtless spend the next few days dissecting her patterned silk Tracy Reese frock, or her very high pink heels, or how she made them feel.

But the first lady is no Barbie doll.

What she is is a Harvard Law School-educated attorney playing dress up in America's most old-fashioned White House position. She took the stage on the exceedingly well-programmed opening night of a political convention designed to reelect her husband -- and used the opportunity to deliver a series of devastating contrasts with the Romney family and policy agenda, cloaked in the bromides of wifely love.

Her description of her youth seemed a calculated effort to paint a contrast with the young Romney family Ann Romney sketched out last week.

You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate ... to me, he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door ... he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.

But when Barack started telling me about his family -- that's when I knew I had found a kindred spirit, someone whose values and upbringing were so much like mine.

Her discussion of her father working vigorously to put her through college despite his multiple sclerosis seemed a subtle but clear reminder that Ann Romney took up horseback riding as therapy for hers:

My father was a pump operator at the city water plant, and he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when my brother and I were young.

And even as a kid, I knew there were plenty of days when he was in pain ... I knew there were plenty of mornings when it was a struggle for him to simply get out of bed.

But every morning, I watched my father wake up with a smile, grab his walker, prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform.

Her comments about the values her parents taught her were greeted by the audience as a direct jab to the Romney-Ryan distortions of the Obama Administration's welfare and entitlement policies, which have been described by some as "factual shortcuts."

We learned about honesty and integrity -- that the truth matters ... that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules ... and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square.

And her repeated refrain "that's who we are" seemed a distinct effort to undermine the argument that Mitt Romney can be trusted with the presidency, because of what his shifting positions reveal about his character:

Those are the values Barack and I -- and so many of you -- are trying to pass on to our own children.

That's who we are.

And standing before you four years ago, I knew that I didn't want any of that to change if Barack became president.

Well, today, after so many struggles and triumphs and moments that have tested my husband in ways I never could have imagined, I have seen firsthand that being president doesn't change who you are -- it reveals who you are.

Tonight, Michelle Obama reminded that she hasn't just been growing vegetables in the White House garden -- she's been sharpening her political skills, too.

Headline courtesy of @gettingsome.

He beat Mitt Romney in a head-to-head contest. Democrats take heart from the late senator's words.

CHARLOTTE -- There's no enthusiasm gap at this Democratic convention when it comes to the cheering sections on the floor. In a pretty effective warm-up act on the opening night of the convention in North Carolina, the party aired a tribute to late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy that really got the crowd going when it featured clips of Kennedy ripping into one Mitt Romney during a 1994 debate when Romney was challenging Kennedy for a U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts. The Romney-Kennedy section starts 1:44 minutes in.

"I believe abortion should be safe and legal in this country," says Romney in the clip.

Kennedy's get the crowd going response: "I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice."