There has been a lot of analysis on Obama's speech last night. Much of it has been too high-fallutin' for my taste. If we're talking about "what Obama needs to do to win," then we're talking about undecided voters whose partisan inclinations are weak at best.

And there's something we need to bear in mind about these people. Most Americans pay little attention to politics; these people often pay even less. So, if we're going to enter into some kind of exegesis of Obama's speech that requires a B.A. in the humanities, we're quickly moving beyond the electoral implications of the speech.

I can do that kind of analysis, but I prefer not to. This isn't called the Horse Race Blog for nothing.

So, a few thoughts on more immediate, visceral subjects.

(1) Obama's sure to get a bounce. His poll numbers were weak going into the convention, so minimally we can expect him to return to his high point over the last few weeks and months.

(2) The reactions among the pundits seemed largely to correlate with pre-existing views about Obama, with a few exceptions. That indicates to me that Obama probably changed few minds last night. If you went into the speech with a strong opinion about Obama, you came out with the same view. The question is how it affected those without strong opinions, which is a question nobody writing a regular political page is immediately capable of answering. That's the trick with undecided voters. They're not part of our little blogospheric clique, so who among us really knows what they think?

(3) I am not a fan of people evaluating political speeches at the venue. According to Nielson's preliminary ratings, about 0.20% of the entire viewing audience was actually at that speech. How can anybody analyze its effect for the 99.8% of us when he or she is one of the 0.20%?

(4) I didn't like the audio/visual mix. It seemed off. The visual image of Obama was a crystal-clear shot framed pretty tight. It seemed like he was indoors. The audio, however, had that echoey sound you typically hear with somebody who is outside.

(5) There were a lot of people at that stadium. That, to me, was a risk. That crowd was so big that television viewers are bound to have an opinion about it. It was not background. It was foreground. I don't see how that helps him.

(6) Obama's eye contact stunk. This was a direct result of the venue. He mostly looked at the crowd. How could he not? I sure as hell couldn't look away from 85,000 people staring directly at me. Obama typically looked at the camera only as a brief pause between the side-to-side stares, and he almost never looked at the camera to make his key points. The bigger problem is that the crowd was above him - so, from the vantage point of the camera, he kept looking up. I saw a lot of Obama's nostrils last night. I don't think that was optimal.

(7) The stage set was not a visual impediment, as many had feared or hoped it would be.

(8) Obama is a good speaker, but his stylistic range is pretty limited. His style lacks the common touch of Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. That's a political problem for him.

Consider a hypothetical experiment. It's 1941. Barack Obama is President of the United States. Bankrupt and exhausted, Prime Minister Churchill turns to President Obama in desperate need of assistance. Knowing full well that his country is deeply suspicious of being drawn into another bloody European war, President Obama must change public opinion to save England.

What would Obama have done? He would have given a soaring peroration that played up the "fierce urgency of now." He would have gone big.

What did FDR do? First, he went small. This is how he introduced Lend-Lease:

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don't say to him, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it." No! I don't want fifteen dollars. I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

Of course, FDR could be grand, too. He gave us garden hoses and the "Arsenal of Democracy." My point is that being small can work. It can be eloquent. It can connect when big can't connect. Americans love small, in part because we see ourselves as being equal to one another. In fact, we love a mix of small and big. Small ingratiates the speaker to average Americans, and then big reminds us of how gosh-darned important we are.

Remember, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 after having played the saxophone on Arsenio Hall. I doubt de Tocqueville would have been surprised by that.

Obama has a lot of great speaking gifts, but they all make him seem larger than the rest of us. I think this is one reason the public doesn't "know" a man who has written two best-selling autobiographies. He's an inspiring speaker, but his speeches never leave one feeling like he's one of us.

The Obama people seem to have intuited this - the McCain "Celebrity" ad probably tipped them off - but I didn't like the response last night. Much like the audio/visual, I don't think last night was mixed well. You had a big speaker at a big venue, but a smaller speech. Obama's "workmanlike prose" fit neither his style nor the venue. It felt like the Rolling Stones appearing before a sold-out crowd at Soldier Field to play an acoustic version of Exile on Main Street. That's not what brought the Glimmer Twins to the show. "Start Me Up" and "Satisfaction" brought them. That's what they should play. If they want to do acoustic Exile, the Vic is right off the Belmont stop on the Red Line.