President Barack Obama's convention speech ranks as the shortest acceptance speech by an incumbent in 36 years. 
 
 According to C-SPAN research, Obama's speech clocked in at 38 minutes and 23 seconds, the briefest nomination acceptance speech by a president since Gerald Ford in 1976. 
 
 While it was roughly 26 minutes shorter than the record-holder since 1972 — Bill Clinton's long-winded 1996 speech — Obama still fell short of Mitt Romney's mark. Romney's acceptance address at the GOP convention ran 37 minutes and 47 seconds, the shortest in either party since Walter Mondale in 1984. 
 
 Read more about: Democratic National Convention 2012 ||||| CHARLOTTE -- That's a wrap. 
 
 The Democratic National Convention is over and the sprint -- 60 days left as of tomorrow! -- to the November election is on. 
 
 But before you start running, rest a while and read our picks for the winners and the losers from the final night of the Democratic convention. 
 
 One person you won't see in winners and losers is President Obama. His speech was certainly not among the best he has ever delivered -- the #1 seed in those rankings is his 2007 Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner address -- and, at times, it felt more like a State of the Union address than a convention acceptance speech. It was workmanlike more than inspirational. 
 
 That said, Obama always faces a very high bar when he speaks since he is rightly regarded as one of the best (if not the best) political orator in the country. The speech will certainly send convention-goers back to their home states excited about the final 60 days of the campaign and there were enough appeals to the political center to make the case that Obama is the right home for them. 
 
 In short: It won't be the sort of historically memorable speech that former President Bill Clinton delivered Wednesday night. But neither will it be remembered as a colossal flop. If we had a category between winning and losing -- we don't -- that's where Obama's speech would fall. 
 
 Without further ado, we present our winners and losers. Have picks of your own? The comments section is open for business. 
 
 WINNERS 
 
 * Gabby Giffords: The former Arizona congresswoman's recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance was an emotional high point at the Democratic convention. Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in January 2011, was aided across the stage by Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz but Giffords spoke the words of the pledge clearly. It was a moment of genuine emotion -- a rarity in our world of pre-planned politics. (video) 
 
 * John Kerry: The Massachusetts senator started off slowly but he certainly amped it up. Kerry, in what will be cast as a tryout for secretary of state if Obama is elected to a second term, offered a scathing assessment of Mitt Romney's foreign policy credentials (or lack thereof). "Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago," Kerry boomed in what will be one of the most oft-quoted lines of the convention. Kerry's 2012 speech left many Democrats wondering where that kind of edge and passion was when he was the party's standard-bearer. Fair question. But tonight Kerry shined. (video and transcript) 
 
 * John Lewis: The Georgia congressman -- and civil rights pioneer -- is among the best speakers Democrats have in the party. On Thursday Lewis delivered a stirring speech connecting the civil rights fight to the fight over voter ID laws. Our issue? Lewis spoke very early in the night, before almost anyone except people like the Fix were watching. Why not put him a little later in the schedule? 
 
 U2: First, Mary J. Blige sang "One." Then Obama came out to give his acceptance speech to "City of Blinding Lights." Not bad for four guys from Dublin. 
 
 * Foo Fighters: The Fix has never been a huge Dave Grohl fan. But the Foo was very good tonight with its acoustic-y set. (video) 
 
 * "Literally": Has the word ever been uttered more in a single convention speech than it was by Vice President Biden tonight? We think not. "Literally" had a coming out party tonight in Charlotte! 
 
 LOSERS 
 
 * Brian Schweitzer: The governor of Montana was one of the breakout stars of the 2008 Democratic National Convention with a speech that lit up the Denver hall. But tonight Schweitzer seemed too folksy by half (or maybe more) -- like he was playing a character named "Brian Schweitzer." And his "that dog won't hunt" refrain, well, it just didn't hunt. 
 
 * Charlie Crist: Party switching convention speakers are rarely well received since the partisans in the audience tend to see the switcher as a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's especially true for Crist who was the REPUBLICAN governor of Florida when President Obama was elected in 2008. Crist's speech was a transparent attempt to get right with the party that he wants to represent when he runs for future office. Even in the room, it was only politely received. At best. (video) 
 
 * Caroline Kennedy: Yes, we know that the daughter of John F. Kennedy is a private person who doesn't like the spotlight. But her speech at the convention tonight was incredibly flat, taking the energy out of an emotionally charged room following Giffords' recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. (video) 
 
 * Osama bin Laden: If you didn't know it before tonight, you know it now: He's dead. Big time. ||||| The president’s convention speech was never going to be a make-or-break moment for him in this campaign: People already have an opinion of him, they basically know his pitch, and unless he planned to offer a major new proposal or argument it wouldn’t have been easy for him to move anyone with his convention closer. But he surely could have done better than he did. He gave the fourth best speech of the Democratic convention, and the three better ones—Bill Clinton’s, Michelle Obama’s, and (rather surprisingly, at least for me) Joe Biden’s—weren’t spectacular. And he gave a speech that couldn’t rank near the top tier of his own presidential speeches. 
 
 The basic problem for a president running for reelection in hard times is to explain how the next four years would be different from the last four without making himself sound like a failure. Obama simply didn’t do that. He offered the Left’s usual confused nostalgia for the early postwar years followed by a vague vision of hope and a set of bland goals that had to leave his listeners wondering why he hadn’t done these things in the last four years, and therefore why we should expect him to be more effective with (almost certainly) even fewer votes in Congress on his side in the next four. He offered no sense that he thinks some significant change of direction is necessary, and therefore seems set on spending the fall insisting that things are on the right track but Mitt Romney would disrupt them. I suspect that won’t be an easy sell. 
 
 The president and his speechwriters must have recognized that this would seem strange, so they gave the speech two further themes—one defensive and one offensive. The defensive theme was an attempt to roll back his “you didn’t build that” gaffe by simply asserting that he and his party do believe in individual initiative, self-reliance, and earned success. He said there were some problems the government couldn’t solve, though he declined to name them. (Later in the speech he also acknowledged that he, not unlike Abraham Lincoln, actually had some failings, though he declined to name those too.) But even as he said this he persisted in the dominant trope of this convention—and, it seems, of contemporary progressive thought: the jump from the sheer fact of human interdependence to a defense of every federal program in precisely its current form. It’s the liberal welfare state or the law of the jungle, and no other alternative is imaginable. This mental gesture—which simultaneously offers an excuse for ignoring the imminent collapse of the liberal welfare state and for ignoring what conservatives are actually saying and offering—really deserves to be thought through. It is a fascinating indicator of the contemporary Left’s intellectual exhaustion. 
 
 The offensive theme was, however, far more ably developed, and it seemed to be the only part of the speech that the president really cared about. It was in part an outgrowth of the same self-righteous progressive error—of the sense that the Republicans are offering radical individualism and a cold and selfish you’re-on-your-own philosophy of government. And to this extent it was answered by a very revealing display of the left’s tendency to collapse all of society—all that stands between the individual and the state—into the state. Different speakers this week took this up in different ways (starting with the opening video in which one of the speakers said that government is the only thing we all belong to), and Obama’s way was to say that his party’s alternative to the every man for himself philosophy of the Right is an idea of citizenship. “We believe in citizenship,” he said, “a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy.” It’s an odd claim, as the word “citizenship” doesn’t appear in any founding document (and to the extent that “citizen” does it describes a legal resident, and never seems to be assigned much significance) and the term citizen actually had a rather complicated place in the parlance of late 18th century Anglo-American politics, often used to refer derisively to radicals. Hamilton’s friends in the newspapers frequently referred to Thomas Jefferson as “Citizen Jefferson,” to Jefferson’s very great displeasure, to highlight his affinity for the French revolutionaries. For Obama, the term seemed to be useful as a way of identifying our commonality with our membership in a political community defined by its government. It is, again, a fascinating instinct, conveying at once both the best and the worst of the old progressive outlook but (it seems) without much reflection on its serious limitations. There is rich potential in the notion of citizenship, but only if it is seen as denoting membership in a society that consists of more than a government. Obama gave no real indication that the word has this meaning for him. 
 
 #more#For the most part, though, the offensive theme was a simpler matter: attacking Mitt Romney and his supposed plans to eradicate all of government while giving tax cuts to the wealthy. The president sought to use the fact that the Republicans last week didn’t have much to say about their own agenda to try to describe that agenda for the country himself. This consisted largely of some indefensible interpretations of Romney’s budget goals and a downright falsehood or two about his Medicare proposal plus the assertion that someone with no foreign policy experience couldn’t be trusted to be president (which does take some gall for this particular president). But the thrust of it, again, was to suggest that Romney wanted to decimate the government for the sake of his rich friends. 
 
 This was really the only coherent message of the speech: Romney would be bad for America. The president laid out no discernible second-term agenda of his own, and his defense of his first term bore no resemblance to what that first term had involved. 
 
 After these two weeks, I think it’s fair to say that both Romney and Obama seek to make the election a referendum on the other guy. Both conventions only got specific in their criticisms of the opposing party, and neither did much to offer a particular agenda for the next four years. This is, at least to this wonk, a disappointing fact. But it does suggest that Romney has some advantage going into the final stretch: the idea that this election is a referendum on the incumbent president will certainly seem much more plausible to swing voters than the idea that it is a referendum on Mitt Romney. If neither side offers much that is new, our unhappy electorate will vote against the status quo. 
 
 Taken as a whole, the Democratic convention was surprisingly strident and culturally liberal, while the Republican convention was mostly just very dull. But if we compare only their 10pm hours—the only ones any moveable voters probably saw—the Democrats put on a better show. At the end of the day, it’s hard to see how these two conventions taken together will move the needle much either way. Good fun for us political junkies, but not a whole lot more.
– President Obama's acceptance speech last night wasn't a complete dud, but it wasn't the finest speech of his career—or of the Democratic National Convention, or even of yesterday, say pundits. At 38 minutes, it was the shortest acceptance speech from an incumbent since Gerald Ford in 1976, Politico notes. The Democrats were having a great convention until the president delivered a "warmed-over rehash of his stump speech" with a "laundry list of familiar proposals," writes Molly Ball at the Atlantic. His speech—which "seemed engineered as a series of defensive moves"—was "so befuddlingly flat as to make you wonder whether its lameness was intentional," she writes. The speech wasn't make-or-break for Obama, but he could surely have done better than the "fourth best speech of the Democratic convention" after Bill Clinton's, Michelle's, and Joe Biden's, writes Yuval Levin at the National Review. Obama "laid out no discernible second-term agenda of his own," and his attack on Romney's "supposed plans to eradicate all of government while giving tax cuts to the wealthy" was the speech's "sole coherent message," he writes. Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post names his winners and losers of the convention, and puts Obama between the two categories. "At times, it felt more like a State of the Union address than a convention acceptance speech. It was workmanlike more than inspirational," he writes. The speech wasn't in the same league as Bill Clinton's, "but neither will it be remembered as a colossal flop." The speech was "forceful, animated, and error-free—but not among his most lustrous rhetorical moments," write Niall Stanage and Amie Parnes at the Hill. The speech "highlighted Obama’s accomplishments, drew broad outlines of what a second White House term would bring, and was jam-packed with stark, sometimes mocking, contrasts between his policies and those" of Mitt Romney, but there wasn't a glimpse of the "more elevated oratory that powered his historic journey to the Oval Office in 2008" until the final minutes.