On my way from the convention hall in St Paul to the press filing room, I walked past an information booth. I was definitely in need of some information. I was tempted to ask the two forlorn women staffing it: "What was John McCain intending to accomplish with that speech?"

Upon reflection, I think maybe I've got it. Given that hating on the media has been such an incessant theme of this convention, I now suspect that the speech was intentionally awful, in order that it generate negative reviews in the press the better to fire up the base against the press. I really can't think of another explanation.

Okay. I'm a liberal in my political beliefs. But I'm also an analyst. I've watched 82,000 political speeches, by speakers from far left to far right. I know a good one when I see one and I can call them as I see them - ideology completely to the side. In 2004, I thought John Kerry's acceptance speech was ghastly. I also thought, as I wrote last night, that Sarah Palin gave a very good speech. Rudy Giuliani gave a very good one too.

John McCain sounded like the vestry board chairman speaking at the church social about the success of the raffle. Or, as a colleague just put it: he looked like the guy who'd been the office accountant for 40 years giving his retirement address. After he'd eaten a little too much Chicken Kiev.

I kept thinking, am I wrong? Am I missing something? I kept getting emails from friends and colleagues as I checked my BlackBerry during the speech. They asked: Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Those in the hall wondered: Maybe this is coming across better on television? Those watching on television asked: Is this coming across better in the hall?

Substance, you ask? Well, he did make about a three-minute nod toward discussing what he would do about the economy. But it was thin, superficial. A feint toward demonstrating that he understands the problems working people are facing. A dollop of rhetoric about job retraining.

But that, I suspect, sounds perfunctory and insincere to the average person, because the average person thinks that Democrats are more sincere about things like that, just as it probably sounds insincere to the average American when Democrats talk about being tough on the crime. Crime is the GOP beat. Job retraining is the Democrats' turf.

Beyond that, it was lower taxes (with an outright lie about Obama's tax proposals) and reduced spending. But there wasn't … well, there wasn't anything. There were no specifics and worse, there was no passion. To say that he will have to sharpen his economic message is akin to saying that Britney has a little work to do to restore her reputation.

Even on foreign policy, McCain wasn't assertive. He went through the motions on Iraq and the surge, but, a vision for the world, or anything like that? He spelled out nothing.

The crowd. It was weird. A protestor got into the hall and disrupted the speech a bit at first. The crowd kept shouting the protestor down by chanting, ever more loudly, "USA! USA!" The chant had a martial and even nasty quality to it and created a strange vibe in the hall. But more than that, the chanters drowned out their own candidate. He had to plead with them for quiet at one point.

At other points, the audience sort of forgot they were supposed to cheer for a few seconds before they remembered and lugubriously put their hands together. As McCain finished up, the applause drowned out the words, but not because the crowd had been driven to an ecstatic frenzy. They seemed to be saying, "Thank God he's done!"

In the speech's last three or four minutes, he did present the lineaments of a coherent theme about country and sacrifice, and how – yes, inevitably – his time in the Hanoi Hilton had taught him to put away childish things and love his country in a more profound way. That is an experience he has that Barack Obama obviously does not, and it works to his benefit.

If he were running at a "normal" time, whatever normal is, it would be enough. And it still might be, given race and other hurdles Obama must jump. But this isn't a normal time. His party's standing is lower than it's been in decades, 80% of Americans think the country is seriously off on the wrong track and people want answers. He certainly did not offer them. I doubt the women in the information booth could have been much help.