Michelle Obama roused the Democratic convention on Tuesday night with a soft-spoken address that tied her modest upbringing and that of her husband to the values that have guided him as president.

In a well-paced, well-packaged opening night that avoided any Clint Eastwood moments, the first lady made a low-key but effective pitch that included this crowd-pleasing line: “Women are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and health care.”

Avoiding the pungent language of other speakers, she weaved a narrative of biography and policy as she concluded, “Barack Obama knows the American Dream because he’s lived it.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign insists it isn’t concerned about the way that Clint Eastwood hijacked the final hour of the Republican convention with a bizarre empty-chair routine that is being widely panned by the media.

“We know it played well in the hall,” Stuart Stevens, the candidate’s top strategist, told me Friday. “I think it played well in the living room. We’re not really concerned about how it played in the green room.”

Romney aides say privately that they did not know what Eastwood was planning to do when he launched into a rambling, sometimes incoherent dialogue with an imaginary President Obama--including the suggestion that Obama had told Romney to perform an anatomically impossible act on himself.

“He just decided to do this,” one said. “He’s an actor. It was improv. He doesn’t like to work off teleprompters. He’s been great before.”

At first glance, Clint Eastwood’s cringe-inducing attempt at comedy in the closing hour of the Republican convention would appear to be a monumentally boneheaded move by the Romney campaign.

It was far worse than that.

The actor’s bizarre interlude essentially negated a solid if unspectacular performance by the Republican nominee for president.

Eastwood, quite simply, made the Democrats’ day.

Mike Huckabee says it was the elephant in the room. 

The former Arkansas governor tells me in a video interview that he mentioned Mitt Romney's religion in his Republican convention speech because "a lot of people had this narrative that evangelicals are not going to vote for a Mormon, that somehow that makes it suspect. I think we have to talk about it."

Huckabee repeated to me his line—picked up by Maureen Dowd—that you don't care if your neurosurgeon is a jerk if your life is at stake. 

Paul Ryan made a generational pitch for fresh leadership on Wednesday, slamming the Obama administration with these words: “Fear and division is all they’ve got left.”

Stepping into the national spotlight at the Republican convention, the vice presidential nominee wasted no time praising Mitt Romney’s “character and decency.” Nor did he wait long to introduce his cute children in the audience, or describe himself as the son of a small-town lawyer also named Paul.

It could not be described as an electrifying speech—Ryan isn’t the barn-burner type—but his plain-spoken, Midwestern style played well in the Tampa arena. True to his reputation as one of the GOP’s leading intellectuals, it was something of a wonky speech sprinkled with folksy references—such as one to his home town of Janesville, Wisc., where “a lot of guys I went to high school with” worked at a GM plant that shut down.

I’ve heard the usual critique of Mitt Romney—stiff, reserved, out of touch—so many times I assume that it’s a pretty solid consensus. Even Romney’s top strategists concede he isn’t comfortable talking about himself.

But Megyn Kelly thinks that assessment is way overplayed.

The idea “that Romney has difficulty coming off as a real person,” trumpeted by the mainstream media, “there’s a little bias in that,” the Fox News anchor tells me in a video interview. “Really? Says who?...I don’t think that should be a headline in a straight newspaper: ‘Romney needs to prove he’s an actual man!’”

As for the coverage of Barack Obama, Kelly says, “Much of the press is still hoping that they were right the first time around. That’s the danger of planting an ideological flag as a reporter.” But while convinced that the press “leans left,” she says, “I think they’re giving him a little bit of a harder time now.”

The spouse and the would-be running mate faced similar challenges on Tuesday night, to do for Mitt Romney what he has been unable to do for himself.

Ann Romney, by far the warmer of the couple, had some success. Chris Christie, who flirted with a presidential run, did himself a whole lot of good, but maybe not much for Romney.

They combined to kick off the Republican convention with a singular task: to offer a richer portrait of a nominee who somehow, at this late date, still needs a proper introduction to the American people.

As a retail politician, Mike Huckabee is everything that Mitt Romney is not: warm, funny, and a natural performer.

At the Republican convention here in Tampa, where the former presidential candidate speaks on Wednesday night, he’s devised a neat formulation to sell a nominee so different in style and tone.

“Mitt Romney is Ward Cleaver,” he tells me. “He’s the dad who can sit down and in a calm, gracious voice make you want to do the right thing and pay for the window you broke with your baseball … He’s not a braggart.”

Perhaps sensing that likening the nominee to a 1950s sitcom character might not be sufficiently dramatic, Huckabee switches to a medical metaphor.

The GOP convention hasn’t gotten underway, but Mitt Romney just conceded the likability contest.

“I don’t think everybody likes me,” Romney told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I don’t believe that, by any means. But I do believe that people of this country are looking for someone who can get the country growing again with more jobs and more take-home pay, and I think they realize this president had four years to do that.”

Translation: The other guy may be more affable and charming, but the economy is still a mess. You don’t have to love me, just give me a shot at the job.

The rain here in Tampa, though not yet at tropical-storm levels, has put a damper on the now delayed convention. But you don’t need a big arena to make news. Romney, who spent much of the campaign avoiding the mainstream media, is finally making use of their megaphone. And he is trying to steer the contest away from the politics of personality.

Tampa, and the Republican convention, may have dodged a meteorological bullet.

But even as Tropical Storm Isaac veers off further down the Gulf Coast, defying earlier predictions, the fallout still threatens to inflict heavy damage on Mitt Romney’s big national moment.

It’s not just that Monday looks to rain on the parade of the thousands of journalists and delegates assembling here. Nor is it the quick decision by GOP officials to pull the plug on Monday’s events, bumping big-name speakers such as Mike Huckabee and losing a valuable day in the spotlight.

TAMPA—Hurricane Isaac has hijacked Mitt Romney’s convention, and the damage is as hard to calculate as the extent of the damage from the coming storm.

Even as the sun filled the blue sky here after a day of light rain late Saturday, Republican Party officials decided to pull the plug on Monday’s proceedings, wiping out a quarter of the convention. And in truth they had no choice.

It’s not just that the party had to worry about the safety of delegates getting into the city. That goes without saying. But the media coverage will be so heavily focused on the storm and its effect on Florida’s west coast as to blot out any speechifying.

Is Wolf Blitzer increasingly indulging in opinion?

In a video interview in The Situation Room, I asked the CNN anchor about the way he’s been challenging political figures lately. He told Donald Trump he was sounding ridiculous on the birther question, and repeatedly pressed Democratic chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to admit that Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan wouldn’t affect anyone now 55 and older.

Blitzer admitted to being more aggressive than in the past. “The notion that politicians can come on and think they’re getting a free ride, I think that’s ancient history. ..We want to ask tough questions, and when we hear something that’s clearly factually wrong, we push back.” He added: “Sometimes people hate you in the process of that, the partisan types on both sides, but it equals out.”

Maybe the conservative critics are right: A whopping 71 percent of the media narrative about Mitt Romney has been negative, a new study says.

But wait: the same report says 72 percent of the media treatment of President Obama has been negative as well.

Apparently, journalists don’t think much of either guy.

Rick Santorum has a simple formulation for how the 2012 election will turn out.

“If the campaign is about issues, we win,” he tells me. “If it’s about Mitt Romney’s record as a businessman, then we don’t win. If it’s about Mitt Romney’s tax returns, then we don’t win. If it’s about whether people like Mitt Romney more than Barack Obama, then we don’t win.”

Despite his bruising primary battle with Romney, Santorum is heading to the Tampa convention next week as a loyal Republican lieutenant on behalf of the party’s ticket. He is energized by Romney’s pick of a fellow Catholic conservative, Paul Ryan—there “couldn’t have been a better choice."

When I asked Chris Cillizza about the name-calling, deception and pettiness that has defined this presidential campaign, he didn’t hem and haw.

“The smallness of our politics is baked in at this point,” the Washington Post blogger, editor and author of The Gospel According to The Fix told me. “We talk about the idea of high-mindedness…and yet all of those conversations inevitably boil down to what you can fit in a 30-second ad, what you can tweet out, and that winds up driving the debate.”

Are journalists partially to blame? Cillizza notes that one of the most popular stories on the Post’s website is not about Paul Ryan’s legislative record but about his P90X workout.