The pro-Bain campaign was a bit less successful. Bob White, Romney's ubiquitous friend from his Bain days, spoke mostly in generalities about what he called an "investment firm." Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples, ruined a potentially good tale of an entrepreneur with a dream by veering instead into a talk-radio-worthy partisan rant against Romney's enemies who "just don't get it!" And a parade of former Olympic athletes, while inspiring and patriotic, just didn't seem relevant.

At this point, something must be said about Clint Eastwood, the 82-year-old Hollywood star whose endorsement was deemed to be so potent and desirable that he was allowed to take the stage totally without a script, accompanied by an empty chair. The chair turned out to be a stand-in for an imaginary President Obama, with whom Eastwood proceeded to have a dialogue. The result was surely the most surreal moment in modern political convention history, about which there is little to be said except that you must see it for yourself. Afterward, a Romney campaign aide dryly told reporters Eastwood's remarks had been "ad-libbed."

Fortunately for Romney, the next speaker was the Republican Party's hands-down greatest public speaker, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who made a remarkable recovery from the Eastwood madness. And then it was Romney's turn.

He laid out his thesis: That the president, having raised Americans' hopes, had sadly let us all down. And then he did the thing he had to do, the thing Mitt Romney is so notoriously bad at that he looms as a sinister cipher in many minds: He talked about himself.

"We were Mormons and growing up in Michigan," he said. "That might have seemed unusual or out of place, but I really don't remember it that way. My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we went to." As he talked about his parents' marriage, his voice grew thick with emotion, and on the big screen you could see his small, dark eyes get shiny and red around the edges. "When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way," he said. "I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, 'Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?'" A clumsy segue to yet another ham-handed pitch for the women's vote, perhaps, but in a rare feat for Romney, the line was actually better in the delivery than on paper.

The same went for Romney's description of Bain, which he managed, for the first time, to convincingly portray as a plucky little firm made good, and which he tied to the convention's No. 1 theme, the accusation that the president disdains the private sector. "In America, we celebrate success, we don't apologize for it," he said, as the delegates rose to their feet and roared. "We weren't always successful at Bain, but no one ever is in the real world of business. That's what this president doesn't seem to understand. Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving."