The performance underscores the limits of Obama’s oratorical skills. | REUTERS Obama fell flat

Barack Obama was flat.

A surprisingly long parade of Democrats and media commentators described the speech less as a failure than a fizzle — an oddly missed opportunity to frame his presidency or the nation’s choice in a fresh or inspirational light.


Even those who liked the president’s performance generally went no further than saying that he was effective in doing a job that needed to be done, in a tough-minded if prosaic style.

( Also on POLITICO: TV pundits split on Obama speech)

These shoulder-shrug reactions confront Obama with a question no one expected to be asking when the week in Charlotte began: How did a president for whom stirring speeches were the engine of his rise to power manage to give, at best, only the third-most compelling speech at a convention devoted to his own reelection?

The answer is not simply that Michelle Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s performances were especially strong.

It is that Obama made a seemingly deliberate choice to keep his remarks chained tightly to the politics of 2012 — a race that has been defined by relentless, almost mechanical efforts to motivate voters with narrow appeals to specific constituencies and to destroy the opposition as a credible alternative.

The performance underscored the limits of Obama’s oratorical skills in the context of a grind-it-out campaign strategy.

( Also on POLITICO: 8 takeaways from the Dem convention)

In a sign that Obama’s high command recognized that were doubts about just how helpful the speech was, though, a senior aide went to reporters on Air Force One Friday to reveal the results of their focus groups on the address — something the campaign rarely does publicly and surely wouldn’t have felt the need to do if the speech had been received as a home run.

According to the pool report, the official said the campaign conducted research on the various speeches “and I think the American people responded very well to the president’s speech.

“They first of all found it to be optimistic, they found it to be credible in terms of his ideas and goals that would help the economy,” said the Obama adviser, adding that their research indicated positive reaction on Obama’s discussion of foreign policy.

The reaction among even many progressive commentators was less effusive.

“Let’s be blunt. Barack Obama gave a dull and pedestrian speech tonight, with nary an interesting thematic device, policy detail, or even one turn of phrase,” wrote Michael Tomasky, the editor of the progressive journal Democracy, at The Daily Beast, in a line that was representative of other commentary.

James Carville, who wanted something bolder, was disappointed. “Certainly not the best speech of this convention,” Carville tweeted minutes after Obama left the podium with wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia.

( PHOTOS: Scenes from the Democratic convention)

The speech “got the job done. But I didn’t feel any real passion in the delivery. It felt more like an actor soldiering through his lines,” wrote Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. “There was nothing memorable, nothing forward looking, and nothing that drew a contrast with Romney in sharp, gut-level strokes. Obama was, to be charitable, no more than the third best of the Democratic convention’s prime time speakers in 2012.”

“Safe speech,” one underwhelmed Democratic strategist told POLITICO. “It’s kind of like you ask someone out on a date, and [at the end] they say, ‘Oh, he’s nice.’”

Obama himself struck a defensive note even as he began speaking, seeming to acknowledge his own disdain for the 2012 campaign.

“Trivial things become big distractions,” the president said. “Serious issues become sound bites. The truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. And if you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am I.”

Yet Obama then went about reprising some of the same attacks that have become background noise on TV sets in swing states across the country.

He mocked Romney for gaffes, insulting the Brits before their Olympics, and went about touching the various Democratic constituencies — gays, abortion-rights supporters, Hispanics — in the same fashion his party had all week in Charlotte.

It was a long ways from Obama’s original convention speech in which he attempted to bridge division, not stoke differences for his own gain.

To sympathetic Democrats, the Obama speech was a reflection of the reality of the campaign: a tough, even scorched-earth approach marks the only path to victory.

“He’s got to win,” responded former Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis when asked on his way out of Charlotte why Obama seems resigned to playing by rules he purports to disdain. “He’s got to win this thing and then he’s going to come back to [Republicans] and say,’ I won, we got four years so let’s be constructive.”

A senior Obama official, when posed with the same question, said much the same when speaking without attribution.

“How would a speech like the one you claim to want help him win the election?” asked the official. “Think about what we need to do to win, motivate our supporters and communicate to swing voters the choice between competing visions for the economy. The speech was designed to meet those goals and did so incredibly effectively.”

Two Democrats with close ties to the Obama campaign, who were familiar with the thinking that went into the address, said the goal was essentially to bring Obama back to earth in terms of how he’s viewed by voters. The Democrats said the campaign believed Obama would get hit hard if he looked to score rhetorical points and so the president instead went more for pragmatism. The campaign is feeling, despite the criticisms, pretty good about the outcome, said the Democrats.

The sources argued that it was wrong to compare the speech to a keynote address and to historic speeches in 2008, noting that the Thursday night address has never been a benchmark that Chicago has pointed to as an inflection point, as opposed to Mitt Romney’s convention speech, which Republicans had focused on for months as an opportunity for the GOP nominee.

Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) on Friday called it an “appropriate” speech for the moment and said Obama was “very clear about his accomplishments, major challenges and the contrast” with the GOP. “He ended on a very high note,” she added.

Had Obama gone for soaring, Schwartz said, he would have run the risk of failing to connect with the real difficulties some voters still face and missed the opportunity to explain the steps he took to stabilize and strengthen the economy.

Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) said Obama didn’t need to fly high. “I just thought it was somewhere in the middle of his speeches. On a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 6 or 7,” Clay said. That was reflective, he said, of “maturity and statesmanship” on the part of the president.

Nathan Daschle, the former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, suggested this appraisal was a rationalization, and that “soaring rhetoric” and a vision for the future “aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Disappointed,” Daschle concluded, asked for his reaction to the speech in a POLITICO interview. “It was sort of a metaphor for his entire first term. There was an opportunity to lay out a vision for the country, where we are going, how we are going to get there, and why. The why is important. The why is his economic theory that ties together raising some people’s taxes while spending more on certain domestic programs. Does he believe government spending leads to economic growth and more jobs?”

Rather than explaining the connections between policy positions and a larger direction for the country — something many people said Clinton did well in his ebullient, conversational Wednesday speech — Daschle said, “He mostly strung together a bunch of electoral pressure points. He’s a great speaker, but last night was not a great speech.”

Some suggested that Obama’s tone reflected the particular challenges of incumbency.

“Clinton sounded more like Obama in 2008, looking to heal the nation. And Obama sounded more like Clinton in 1996, seeking to divide the country,” said former George W. Bush strategist Mark McKinnon.

If Democrats were a bit disappointed, many conservative commentators were far more withering.

“I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004, and he gave one of the emptiest speeches I have ever heard on a national stage,” said Charles Krauthammer on Fox News Thursday night. “This is a man who believes that government can and should do a lot. There is nothing in here that tells us how he’s going to go from today to tomorrow. For any of the so-called goals and what government is going to do, what is he going to enact?”

“In the shadow of Clinton’s performance, the president often felt flat, rote, and unconvincing — almost as though he wasn’t quite convinced by his own arguments and promises, and felt a little awkward selling them to us,” wrote The New York Times’ Ross Douthat.

“His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There’s too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal,” wrote Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. “It was stale and empty. He’s out of juice.”

Even more sympathetic observers said the lofty rhetoric of Obama’s 2008 convention speech was replaced with slimmed-down ambition and goals appropriately reflecting the president’s acquaintance with presidential power and its limits.

“[T]his was a modest speech. It was a more humble vision,” wrote Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. “And so it didn’t ask you to believe that Obama could accomplish miracles. It didn’t ask you to believe he could change Washington or stop the oceans from rising. The promises were more modest, the president explicit about how often he had been humbled, and the agenda was meant to make voters feel safer with the Democrat they know than the Republican they don’t.”

“It’s a more dignified speech, but he’s scarred. He’s more mature and he’s not promising as much,” said CNN’s David Gergen on Thursday evening. “There is very little here in the way of promises about jobs in terms of where we’re going on this, how much we’re going to get the deficit down quickly. I thought he lowered the bar in terms of what he was trying to achieve.”

“The speech was dominated by unexplained goals that were often worthy, but also familiar, modest and incommensurate with the problems at hand,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. “[C]hange is still the issue, and the focus of his solid but not extraordinary speech was incremental improvement.”

The modest goals were accompanied by a lack of specificity, which commentators dug into as well.

“I went into the speech looking for a very specific agenda about what this president wanted to pursue if he was reelected. You’re in Congress. I didn’t get that from last night. I still don’t know in January what he’s going to tell you guys in Congress to do. He talked about some goals, in terms of manufacturing jobs and the deficit, but what is this president’s legislative agenda?” said The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza on CNN’s “Starting Point” Friday morning.

While many commentators agreed that Obama fell short of his own high bar for speeches, it’s even hard to make the case his address was appreciably better than Romney’s. In both cases, it was a strong finish, punctuated by a thundering response inside the arena, that redeemed the speeches.

It is fitting that neither Obama nor Romney did anything to clarify the race — they entered tied, performed at similar levels, and likely left Florida and North Carolina tied.

Jim VandeHei, Maggie Haberman, and Tim Mak contributed to this story.