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I received an email from one of the smartest reporters around who asked, “What does it say about the POTUS that he didn’t even give the best speech of his own convention?” He was echoing the reaction of a broad swath of the pundit class.

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During Barack Obama’s highly anticipated speech at the Democratic National Convention, the President mentioned a handful of ordinary Americans who give him “hope”. The controversial word that defined his 2008 campaign was applied to citizens Obama never mentioned by name.

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Barack Obama’s team wanted an earthbound speech, and they got it.While the pundits are generally calling the president’s Thursday night address mediocre, Obama and his advisers had taken great pains to avoid soaring rhetoric that might have been derided as empty.

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Just hours before the first African-American president was set to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Al Sharpton convened a group of black pastors, political leaders, and community activists to discuss the problem and the plan for 2012.

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Ever since Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan made a number of misleading claims in his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, fact checkers have kept a close eye on the assertions candidates from both parties make onstage.

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To be honest, I was underwhelmed.Obama’s acceptance speech had two apparent goals: The first was to lay out an agenda for the next four years so people feel they have something forward-looking to vote for. The second was to recapture the sense of hope that defined Obama’s 2008 campaign.

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Obama’s Sick of Hearing Himself, TooEach year, political campaigns become increasingly focused on trivial, ridiculous moments. Obama is the first to admit it, calling those small, silly things “big distractions” and bemoaning the fact that the larger, more important issues become “sound bites.

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President Obama invoked FDR in making his case for a second term on Thursday night, replacing his hope-and-change mantra with a more sober challenge for a “harder” path to economic prosperity. In an acceptance speech seemingly aimed at critics who said he has been short on substance, Obama coupled a call for $4 trillion in deficit reduction—the deal he failed to strike with the Republicans—with a pitch for investments in energy and education while protecting middle-class benefits.

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On Friday, pollsters will be crunching numbers coming out of the convention. But the most consequential number will be released at 8:30 a.m.: the August payroll jobs report. The strength (or weakness) of that report will be enormously consequential for this fall’s election.

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Maybe Nancy Pelosi really believes she’ll once again be speaker of the House next year.“We’re going to go mano-a-mano,” the 72-year-old House minority leader promised Thursday in Charlotte, N.C., site of the Democratic National Convention, where she predicted that the Dems will pick up 27 seats in November—two more than necessary to regain the majority.

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It was one of those rare unscripted moments where viewers could observe on live television differences among the delegates in Charlotte, N.C., on how to handle God and Israel in the Democratic Party platform. With Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa presiding, the delegates, 6,000 strong, shouted out their ayes and nays three separate times before Villaraigosa, the convention chairman, pronounced victory for the ayes, claiming they had provided the required two-thirds voice vote even though to most ears, the delegates sounded pretty evenly divided.

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Talk about a finger in the eye. It’s bad enough that Vice President Joe Biden isn’t getting his own night to shine at the convention. It’s worse still that he’s speaking so early tonight that only one of the big three networks is scheduled to carry the address.

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Predicting that Bill Clinton would deliver a knockout nominating speech last night was easy.Predicting the weather in Charlotte is a bit more difficult, causing President Obama’s acceptance speech tonight to be moved from an outdoor stadium that seats 70,000 to an indoor arena that seats 20,000—leaving about 50,000 of the faithful without seats and sorely disappointed.

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Will.i.am is fired up.It’s just past midnight and we’re hanging out in the bedroom of his sprawling hotel suite at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Charlotte, N.C. In the living room, a DJ booth has been erected and a baby-grand piano sits in the corner.

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While Democrats in Charlotte, N.C., were basking in the Bill Clinton afterglow and eagerly awaiting President Obama’s Thursday night acceptance speech, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was making the most of an embarrassing misstep concerning the capital of Israel.