CHARLOTTE, NC — Two hours after getting drunk on the rhetorical moonshine served up by Bill Clinton Wednesday night, delegates and hacks won’t stop believin’ there’s a decent place to get a real drink in this dismal Southern burg.

We’re stumbling thirstily along South Tryon Street at 1:31 a.m. when a hunched lone figure is stopped by an excitable young woman. Dude is dressed all in black, scraggly beard, greasy hair, tiny frame. He’s so aggressively meek that he’s gotta be a celebrity of some sort. He looks like the rough draft they threw out when they were making Johnny Depp.

Girls in iridescent cocktail dresses and freshly pressed hair have a better sense for these things than I. They flock around the little guy brandishing iPhones. He poses without smiling, then moves along, hands in pockets, the weight of fame pressing his head downward.

“Who was that?” we ask, for we are tired middle-aged hacks, not swoony young Democratic party groupies on the make.

“JARED GATO!!!!” cries one of the young women.

“Who?” says a colleague.

“Thirty Seconds to Mars?” she says.

Ah, well. If you’re extremely female and 24, Jared Leto is indeed the singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars, a mediocre rock band. If you’re the same plus 20 years, he’s an actor, the one who played the dreamboat on “My So-Called Life.”

On the other hand, if you have any taste, he is (along with Meat Loaf) one of Tyler Durden’s creepy postmodernist terror troops in “Fight Club.”

Mr. Gato/Leto is, in other words, a rock star, a love object, a monster.

He reminded us all of another celebrity shuffling dejectedly through Charlotte. Another guy whose best work was years ago, whose reinvention hasn’t really worked out, who was a heartthrob before he became just “that guy.”

And though his youngest fans still want a picture, they’re a little confused about his true identity.

What happened to the great conciliator who said, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” at the DNC in 2004?

This time around, Barack Obama the unifier became Barack Obama the divider.

Speaker after Democratic National Convention speaker pursued a strategy of Karl Rovian “shoring up the base” — appealing to specific minority interests rather than the general interest — by emphasizing, and re-emphasizing, and re-re-emphasizing, the party’s stance as the champion of abortion (“women’s health decisions”), gay marriage (“who we love”) and illegal immigrants (“Dreamers”). As though any American seriously doubted which party was more supportive of these things.

In 2004, Obama said, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states.” The Almighty’s awesomeness had been substantially downgraded by last week, when Obama approved a platform that excluded the word God. Then, under pressure, he restored it.

But a flock of the faithless thrice cried “No!” when asked whether a single mention of God should be added to the party platform. They furiously booed when their voice vote was ignored.

To put it mildly, booing God doesn’t look good when the world is watching, and the pundits were forced to hit pause on 30 years of asserting conventions are phony stage shows to admit that the Democrats had come up with something spontaneous, and it was spontaneous combustion.

Who boos God? Who makes a fuss over one harmless word? Were they worried about offending the United Association of Satanists? Does Lucifer have a back-channel link to Valerie Jarrett? Did Beelzebub go to school with Tim Geithner?

But Democrats didn’t need God in the platform. Because as of Thursday night, they had God on the platform.

Obama walked on stage for what could be the second to last of his 45,617 nationally televised addresses, should he be forced to concede on Nov. 6. On this night, true to the party’s three-day mission to alienate the American middle, the crowd frequently chanted, “Four more years!” as though they didn’t read the memo that only 23% of Americans consider themselves better off than in 2008.

Obama did not mention the Lord (except for the “God bless you” stuff at the end) but did quote Scripture. It turns out the part he finds intriguing is the seven words that sound most like one of his campaign slogans: “Ours is a future filled with hope.”

But according to the speech, ours is a future filled with the past. Thousands of words boiled down to three: “More of same.”

Obama promised more unfunded “investments” of the kind he borrowed $5 trillion to buy in his first term — in the poor, in health care, in clean energy, in education, in regulations. He issued prickly defenses of previous bailouts and handouts. Like his predecessors on the podium (“The rescue of the auto industry . . . saved more than 1 million American jobs,” said Joe Biden at a particularly ludicrous moment), Obama sought to portray himself as the Jesus with the power to raise an Escalade from the dead.

“We reinvented a dying auto industry,” he claimed, by which he meant he bailed out the unions that had bankrupted two of the many companies that build cars here. Ford, to Obama, doesn’t count and the nonunion manufacturers in right-to-work states super-especially don’t count.

Oh, and all auto manufacturing in the US combined employs only 700,000 people. Saving GM and Chrysler saved 1 million out of 700,000? Must be another lesson in what Obama called “Clinton arithmetic.” Which is a class taught right after the Clinton English seminar on the definition of “is.”

Nor would GM have ceased to exist (Biden: “If the president didn’t act immediately, there wouldn’t be an industry left to save”). Had it gone through an ordinary bankruptcy; it simply would have restructured and shed more of the union obligations that are a hazard to its long-term health. And far from thriving, GM (“on top of the world” — Biden) is about to fall into third place and its stock has been about as attractive as Groupon’s. Taxpayers got the sticker shock of $25 billion. And for that they didn’t even send you a Malibu.

I have no idea where Biden learned such misleading tactics, but by coincidence he is the son of a used-car salesman. (Or as he put it in his speech, “an auto man.”)

Obama was lively. The crowd was jubilant. It’s just his ideas that were dead. Even the people who get paid to notice things have finally noticed. (“Oba-meh” — Politico. “Just didn’t have that spark” — Bob Schieffer. “Disappointed me, and I’m not quite sure why” — Joe Klein). Believe it or not, a recent study rated coverage of Obama on MSNBC to be only 54% favorable.

Walking out of the convention center, Sam Donaldson compared Obama to a poker player who keeps raising but eventually gets called — on the pair of deuces he’s holding. On Wednesday, two-thirds of Democratic consultants (and 98% of GOP ones) surveyed by National Journal said Obama had not answered the charge that we’re worse off than four years ago. How could he? Real median wages last quarter were down 1.5% in the last two years — and are still lower than they were in 2002. Joblessness has been over 8% for a 43 months.

So why did the crowd cheer? The answer was written on a bus parked outside the arena.

It was promoting an Obama-backing PAC, and emblazoned on its side was an elaborately painted image of the president and the legend, “STOP DISRESPECTING MY PRESIDENT!”

Note the possessive. One of Obama’s big applause lines Thursday was this: “I’m no longer just a candidate. Now I’m the president.” It’s impossible to imagine George Bush or Jimmy Carter inviting people to cheer his job title, but the Democrats were really cheering for themselves, for having the goodness of heart to make this man the leader of the free world. MY president.

This is why so many Democratic speakers fired up the crowd by excoriating Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s unexceptional statement that denying the president a second term was his party’s “top political priority.” Was not defeating President Bush Democrats’ top political priority in 2004? Of course. The difference is that people didn’t feel that President Bush was them. To put the goal of defeating Obama so bluntly felt like singling out the nation’s most successful black man. It felt personal, it felt like disrespect.

Obama is unlike any candidate in the way many millions of his supporters feel a personal connection to him, one that can be closely tied to race. Black Americans have many good reasons to feel they have received less than adequate respect in the history of our country, and to many of them any knock on Obama — even in the cold, hard language of budget numbers — is a knock on the entire group.

Core supporters are thinking, “What did people expect? Miracles? Do they ever hold a white guy to that standard?” The Nov. 5, 2008, issue of The Onion was prophetic: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” The story continued, “In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis.”

Voters know, or think they know, that Obama means well, but they also know he has failed. Democrats know this also, hence the many variations on Bill Clinton’s implausible excuse (cue the finger wag most famously deployed in denying he had sexual relations with that young woman), “No president — not me, not any of my predecessors — no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.”

Clinton offered no support for this unprovable assertion, just as he didn’t explain how it is possible that Democrats should feel good both about the Clinton years, when the federal share of GDP fell from 22% to 18%, and the massive Obama spending spree that jacked that figure up to a gargantuan 24%. Few can be persuaded that more of such extravagant waste will form what Clinton called “the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity.”

In Romney’s tenderly brutal formulation, “You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had is the day you voted for him.”

Even many white moderates who convene in focus groups speak in hushed tones of their personal fondness for Obama, or at least for his “story.” Catering to them is a group of the most polite and delicate attack ads in history, in which ordinary people first praise Obama before announcing their support for his challenger. Undecided voters say things like, “He’s trying,” but also things like, “Disappointing.”

Obama is pitied.

And that has to be even more infuriating than the racism he famously predicted would be at the heart of any case against him (“He’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?” was his best guess at how the attack ads would go).

The opposite has been the case: Romney treads carefully because of Obama’s race. He must not make things personal, must not indulge in name-calling of any kind, must not turn Obama into a victim. Yet in a sense Obama is the nation’s No. 1 victim, of the absurdly grandiose mythology he unabashedly encouraged.

The sound of a giant hot-air balloon deflating was everywhere at the convention, if you were listening for it. Thursday afternoon Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters chose to sing “My Hero,” which he said “makes perfect sense here.” So it did, as it seemed to usher Obama out the door of the White House: “There goes my hero/Watch him as he goes/He’s ordinary.”

Even more painfully, hilariously appropriate was Mary J. Blige’s bizarre choice to perform U2’s “One” — a breakup song that for 20 years has been mistaken for an anthem of unity. (The band’s guitar player The Edge once said he was gobsmacked to hear that newlyweds were playing it at their weddings.)

“I’m just so glad that we’re all in this together,” Blige said, echoing a notion trumpeted dozens of times at the podium over the three days. Yet the song sounded like a cross-examination of the president on this stage. “Is it getting better?/Or do you feel the same” sounded like a Republican attack ad. Then Blige continued on with what sounded like a mockery of Obama’s speech and his failure to wield mystical powers (“Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?”)

In the song you can also hear Obama’s plea that we should (somehow, impossibly) carry each other. But there’s still no doubt that “One” is about lost patience, affection reaching its expiration date.

The caustic climax of “One” seemed to presage the dismal jobs report that would come out 18 hours later and reveal that four times as many Americans dropped out of work as found jobs last month.

It sounded like the two-thirds of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track.

It sounded like the pro-Romney ad released the very same day that likened America’s love affair with Barack Obama as a relationship that just didn’t work out.

“You gave me nothing now,” Blige sang, for America. “It’s all I got . . . I can’t be holding on/To what you got/When all you got is hurt.”