President Barack Obama (Vote Like It Counts!) Pierced By Time?

DOING NORTH CAROLINA PROUD (HE KNOCKS IT OUT OF THE COUNTRY!)

Now if we could only develop some unions.

(Nonstop sprint starts tomorrow in earnest in battleground states. Early voting begins in Iowa in three (count 'em, three) weeks!)

Watch words from the  Democratic Convention:

KEEP HOPE ALIVE

WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN

I'M HOPEFUL BECAUSE OF YOU!

- PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

And every party should always be presented with a truthful bill!

Love that hug! (The B Brothers? Bill and Barack.)

Choose wisely, my friends.

It's the only country most of us have.

And here's some Convention Coverage at Charlie's place:

President Obama Falls Back to Earth, Transformed

Tom Junod

at 3:30AM

(Photograph by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

"I'm the President," the President said, reminding us of his power. But he was also reminding us that as a candidate who rose to power on the politics of pure potential, he is, as President, a fallen man.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — We should have seen this coming. We were told that it was coming, all week long. We were warned. We should have known that Barack Obama would emerge from this convention conventionalized — that is, as a more conventional politician than he was when he went in. Or that we ever thought he could be.

For the last three days, we watched the Democratic Party finally respond to the eternal Republican charge that it exists in contravention of basic American values by deciding that it could carry the fight to the Republicans on the level of values — that values had become the Republican vulnerability. And so for the last three days we watched the Democratic Party stage a convention that was designed as a mirror image of successful Republican ones, down to its disciplined and endlessly iterated and reiterated message.

Speaker after speaker said the same thing, which was not that they were self-made but rather American-made, formed by the sense of common interest that the Republicans had decided to mock and spurn. Inspiring story followed inspiring story, unless Bain Capital had a say in the outcome; millionaires volunteered to pay their fair share; and Osama bin Laden — and only Osama bin Laden — remained usefully dead.

Hard work, fair play, individual responsibility, and, above all, motherhood: on the level of platitude, the convention was relentless, and it might have turned into a comic spectacle if it had not also managed to be sometimes moving and at other times thrillingly ruthless — if it didn't seem to work, especially in its effort to transform apparent Democratic vulnerabilities on the issues of immigration and gay marriage into Republican ones.

And then the convention did the same thing with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. All along, Obama's vulnerability has not just been that an enduring portion of the American electorate regards him as alien; it has been that a fickle portion regards him as a disappointment. If the last three and a half years have made anything clear, it's that he's not the transformational talent that we thought he was. He has not changed our politics and he never will.

Instead of genius, he has given us a doggedness more aloof than endearing, and has often failed exactly where he has succeeded, which is to say that he has failed to sell his successes. It is a failure unforgivable to those who voted him in for the privilege of being the object of his discourse, a failure akin to a Bill Clinton who assumed office only to abdicate his responsibility to charm the pants off his constituents. It might be a fatal failure, if it did not somehow make Barack Obama more familiar to us — and render Mitt Romney more exotic.

The Obama-ifying of Mitt Romney was the pitiless thrust of both the convention and the acceptance speech that provided its climactic anticlimax. The Republicans have been trying to scare us with the dark shadow of Barack Obama for so long that they never foresaw the possibility that Obama took advantage of here on Thursday night — the possibility that Americans would get used to him, and that his disappointing stolidity could become reassuring. Obama's not up against a guy who can go to his convention and tell another inspiring story of overcoming adversity, at least not with a straight face; he's up against a guy whose entire convention groaned under the task of making him seem less foreign — of humanizing him.

And because Obama has the luxury of facing an opponent who is the unwieldiest of combinations, an establishment outsider, he also has the luxury of recalibrating our expectations. His speech didn't have to be a departure; it had to be a return. It didn't have to take flight; indeed, to paint Mitt Romney as one of them and himself as one of us, all it had to do was tug him back to earth.

The wounded warrior, taking punches.

And so it did. He didn't rise to the occasion on Thursday night; he not only didn't reinvent the possibilities of political language, he used language that many people had to feel they'd heard before. His speech was disappointing until, with about ten minutes to go, it acknowledged disappointment, and so began its rise.

"The times have changed — and so have I," he said. "I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president." Of course, he was reminding us of his power; the fact of his presidency has become an argument for his presidency. But he was also reminding us that as a candidate who rose to power on the politics of pure potential, he is, as president, a fallen man. "And while I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failiings, 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.'"

This was where the speech turned, and became, in its statement of humility, a statement of rousing power. "I ask you for your vote," he said, and his commonplace words had a beseeching quality that put them outside the realm of political performance. He had failed to transform his office, and failed to transform our politics, but he sounded fully aware that he had been himself transformed.

He had started out as the Cassius Clay of our politics, brash and blinding, with an abilty to do things in the ring that no one else had ever thought of — with an ability to be untouchable. Now he stood inside the ring of stars on the blue carpeted stage of the Democratic National Convention as the Muhammad Ali whose greatness was proven after he returned to boxing bigger, slower, harder-hitting but also easier to hit.

Oh, Ali got touched, all right, and since he lost his skill at avoiding punches he had to find the skill of taking them. He became a prodigy not of otherworldly gifts but rather of sheer will, and so it was with Obama in his speech on Thursday night. At an event that paid endless tributes to our wounded warriors, he rebranded himself as something of a wounded warrior himself; and at the very moment when those who remembered 2008 hoped he might say something that no one had ever heard before and maybe even reinvent, one more time, the possibilities of a word as hackneyed as hope itself, he instead completed his hard-won journey to convention.

MORE FROM THE LAST NIGHT AT THE CONVENTIONS: Charles P. Pierce on Obama's Speech for Us (and Romney) and the Thing Not Enough People Talked About, and, Coming Friday, Mark Warren on the Triumph Joe Biden

Read more here.