I said last night that Barack Obama's acceptance speech, while not as flashy as some others in his past and several others at the convention, "did the job" he needed it to do. It was solid, serious, and under- rather than over-emotional -- traits shared by his strikingly low-key inaugural address -- and in that sense was a better bet for the president than going all-out to repeat his "Yes we can!" performance of four years ago.

- If he had been much more flowery, at a time of discouraging economic realities, he would be teed up for criticisms that "he's out of touch," or "he's all talk," or "great at speeches, bad at results." Those would have been at least as burdensome as the "too downbeat" criticism he is getting instead.

- Instead he was sober, meat-and-potatoes, going into as much detail as a convention speech (vs. a State of the Union) allows. Anyone complaining that there was "not enough substance" in his talk needs to go look at some past nominees' convention speeches. It is possible to go too light on the details, as Mitt Romney must now regret doing in his failure to talk about Afghanistan. But Obama served up about as much policy as normal convention speeches will bear.

- It's important to stress that it doesn't matter if Obama "fell short" of the emotional level of his wife's speech, or the crowd-command of Bill Clinton's. The rank-the-speakers derby had an entirely different edge for the Democrats than for the Republicans. Bill Clinton is no doubt savoring every story saying that his speech was the highlight of the convention. But for Obama, all that matters is that Clinton is now doing his best to pull the nominee across the line. (Think how history would be different if Al Gore had asked Clinton to do this 12 years ago.) At the RNC, by contrast, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio were "helping" Romney -- sort of. To spell it out: they're better off if he loses this year.