Ann Romney promised, in her speech, that her husband “will not fail.” But she never said at doing what. That’s not an accident. As Paul Ryan demonstrated, he and his band of Ayn Randians will employ any lies needed to disguise their true agenda of dismantling the New Deal. Ryan implied that Obama had failed to save a General Motors plant that was actually closed under George W. Bush; he blasted Obama for not taking responsibility for our job and fiscal deficits, while not acknowledging a whit of G.O.P. responsibility for the Bush-era spending recklessness that dug these holes; Mitt Romney lashed out at Obama for leading from behind on foreign policy and then virtually ignored foreign policy in his speech. Almost every G.O.P. speaker boasted of their immigrant roots, while the party remains the biggest opponent of immigration reform. It was a festival of hypocrisy — without shame. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Neil Newhouse, the lead Romney pollster, told critics. Say what?

Image Thomas L. Friedman Credit... Josh Haner/The New York Times

But I bet one line in Ryan’s speech hit home with some undecided voters — when he said of Obama: “Now all that’s left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired.” Unlike Ryan, Obama is not giving speeches built on lies, but the truths that he’s telling are very small. He is neither running on his own record nor the promise of a new journey. As I’ve said, this is the first election ever where both men are running as “I’m not Mitt Romney.”

Dov Seidman, a business philosopher and C.E.O. of LRN, points out that when President Kennedy launched America in 1962 “on a journey to the Moon, he made a point of saying it would be done within the decade,” and “it was such a powerful, inspiring and big vision that it lived on, even though the president himself died before it was completed.” It’s been a long time since any U.S. politician “launched the country on a journey of progress so inspiring that realizing it would have to extend beyond his term in office.”

This election, notes Seidman, has largely been about “how to shift a tiny sliver of swing-state voters from one camp to the other, but no one is trying to elevate us, by taking us all, as a nation, on some daring new journey.” And a journey is not just a speech. It has to come with a strategy to rally people behind it and generate the legislation and policies needed to implement it.