And I took him to see Barack Obama.

We saw him two blocks away from a GED program where I was still teaching kids who had dropped out of high school.

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According to Nielsen, 14.7 percent of Americans watched Biden's speech, compared with 13.7 who watched Obama's, and 12.5 percent who watched Romney's.

Bill Clinton was the next highest with 10.9 percent, and Clint Eastwood was down at No. 6 with 9.9 percent.

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So this tidbit in the just-released Pew poll stands out: 48 percent of respondents preferred Barack Obama when it came to "reflecting your view on abortion." That's up by 13 points. Compare that to the 35 percent who said Mitt Romney reflected their views, following several weeks of Democrats working hard to equate Paul Ryan and the Republican platform with Todd Akin on rape and incest exceptions. (Despite Romney's current support of them.) Obama also enjoyed similar growth on issues like foreign policy and healthcare, suggesting an overall lift. But there is no reason to think anyone was pushed away by Democrats defending their support for access to abortion or contraception.

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The vote was 310-95.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla, who sponsored the legislation, says the government has spent about $224 million on the quadrennial gatherings of party faithful since 1976, when in the post-Watergate era it was considered a way to reduce the influence of money in politics.

He says this year federal assistance for the two conventions was about $35 million, slightly more than 20 percent of the total costs as the parties turn to private donors to pay for the lavish events. In 1980 federal grants paid for nearly 95 percent of convention costs.

"There's no need to be writing checks to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party," Cole said. "Clearly it's an idea whose time has come and gone."

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With a domestic economy in ruins and an electorate afraid for their jobs, their homes, and their health care, there seemed to be little energy left to ponder problems in distant lands.

This suited Republican challenger Mitt Romney just fine.

More than one pundit has joked that Romney’s foreign policy experience ends at the offshore banks where he parks his money.

“Mitt has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport,” quipped former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

Besides, there was little actual daylight between the positions of incumbent President Barack Obama and his rival on the main issues: While Romney tried his best to find fault with Obama’s plan to withdraw most American combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014, the truth is that there was simply no domestic appetite for prolonged debate over an endless and seemingly fruitless war.

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The attack turns the tables on the one Democrats, via Sen. John Kerry, leveled against Romney’s convention speech for leaving out any reference to troops serving abroad or to the war in Afghanistan. But unlike Kerry’s speech, Romney’s isn’t exactly true.

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The organization, Engage, compared Twitter data (via Topsy) against polling data from Gallup, Rasmussen and Reuters-Ipsos from the DNC and RNC to determine if real-time tweets at all correlated with polls. The study isn't perfect -- for example, Engage assumed that the daily polls fluctuate based solely on the performance of the speakers, and that words like “awesome" and “wow" in tweets signal interest in speakers -- but for the most part, the study showed that tweets matched up with the polls:

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Answer: A rowboat. Yes, really.

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On Tuesday Gallup reported that the "U.S. Gallup Economic Confidence Index" jumped 11 points during the week of the Democratic National Convention.

The jump was the sharpest since the inception of the index and marks the high point for 2012. And it's a puzzler. One might expect that after Bill Clinton's speech, Americans would be more inclined to blame Republicans for the mess we're still in. But to be more confident about their own prospects? That's peculiar. And it's all the more befuddling because the week finished with a disappointing labor report. There's no objective, quantifiable reason why Americans should have ended last week considerably more optimistic about the economy than they began it.

Except, perhaps, that speech by the first lady?

It appears that the spark for the dramatic rise in Americans' economic confidence last week was the Democratic National Convention. A review of Gallup's nightly tracking results shows that the index was consistently near or below -25 each night in late August and early September, but then sharply improved on Sept. 4, the first night of the convention, to -18.

Confidence then held at or near -18 through Sunday, despite the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' mixed August unemployment report Friday morning showing continued weak jobs growth.

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In TPM, Evan McMorris-Santoro reports that Walsh, R-Ill., was speaking at a campaign stop in Illinois on Saturday, and slammed Fluke's DNC speech, in which she expressed support for contraception coverage. "Think about this, a 31-32 year old law student who has been a student for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the American people, ‘I want America to pay for my contraceptives.’ You’re kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job, Sandra Fluke," Walsh said.

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Baldwin had used the term "heartland values" to describe the contents of her DNC speech, which she delivered Thursday night. Beforehand, Mike Juley of the Milkwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports, Thompson political director Brian Nemoir sent out an email with a video of Baldwin dancing at a gay pride parade in 2010, alongside a fake Wonder Woman. "Clearly, there's no one better positioned to talk ‘heartland values’ than Tammy,” Nemoir wrote in the email.

Here's the video in question:

The Journal-Sentinel asked Nemoir about the email, and he replied: “I think there are issues in this race that are extremely significant that will be generated on a day-to-day basis and I look forward to coverage of those issues.”

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Erickson, who's both a CNN contributor and blogger for the conservative website Red State, is being targeted by a women's advocacy group after he tweeted this about the female speakers during day one of the DNC:

First night of the Vagina Monologues in Charlotte going as expected.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 5, 2012

He tweeted an apology shortly after:

My apologies to those offended by my tweet.Wasn't my intention.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 5, 2012

But that wasn't enough for the women's advocacy group UltraViolet, which shortly after launched a petition to get him yanked off of CNN. "Seriously?" the petition asks. "He hears powerful, eloquent women talking about crucial issues and that's his reaction? Perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising, given his history of insulting women." It then noted how Erickson defended Rush Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke.

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The week’s first slight to teachers’ unions came Monday, before the convention had even kicked off. Convention Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa spoke at a special screening of the upcoming Hollywood film “Won’t Back Down” for DNC delegates. He was joined by fellow Democratic mayors Cory Booker and Kevin Johnson, top union antagonist Michelle Rhee, and the director of Parent Revolution, a group pushing for “parent trigger.” The film is a sympathetic fictional portrayal of “trigger,” a policy which creates a mechanism for replacing union public schools with non-union charters, based on signatures from parents. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently wrote that the film has “egregiously misleading scenes” which depict a union preventing teachers from working past 3 PM and protecting a teacher who punishes kids by putting them in the closet.

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The DNC kicked off the first night with a tribute to the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, Romney's former opponent.

Gifs from last night via current.com

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was not impressed:

[embedtweet id="243135234298753024"]

Around 9 p.m., the actor Kal Penn took the stage. He ended his speech like this:

"Before I close, and as I wonder which Twitter hashtags you’ll start using when I’m done talking–#sexyface–I ask all of you young people to join me. You don’t even have to put pants on. Go to commit.barackobama.com and register right there."

And lo, #sexyface trended on Twitter:

Kal Penn's work here is done.

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro delivered Tuesday’s keynote address.

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As the capper to a convention full of stunning dramatic speeches that were equal parts inspiring and packed with detail and convincing arguments, Obama's speech came as a disappointment to many of the people who are paid to write about his speeches. As someone who has watched every major Obama address since 2004, I felt their pain. If you already had decided that Obama was a guy long on rhetoric and short on grit, there was nothing to change that impression in his convention speech. And if you were looking for a serious plan on how to boost job growth -- particularly in the short term, the here and now -- you were flabbergasted.

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“Obviously, we would have hoped that it would have been brought up as an issue by someone,” said Ladd Everitt, the communications director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. The only reference to guns he heard was when Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer attacked Mitt Romney for raising the fees on gun licenses as governor of Massachusetts. “So it’s certainly not quite the result we wanted on the Democratic side, but it was also very fascinating to just not -- I don’t recall hearing a Republican speaker explicitly talk about the right to keep and bear arms. So it was interesting to me that it didn’t really play on either side.”

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Giffords has made few public appearances since the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson in which she was shot in the head at point-blank range -- and six other people were killed. It was a devastating injury. Giffords had part of her skull and brain removed, underwent intensive reconstructive surgery, and lost the full use of the right side of her body and half of her vision. Yet her recovery has been nothing short of astonishing – a woman whom early media reports had presumed dead was walking, reading and speaking again, after just months of rigorous therapy.

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The speakers at the DNC did plenty of things at their convention: explaining the economy President Obama inherited and the steps he took to turn it around, standing up for the rights of voters and women and gay people and immigrants, and outlining a clear vision of America based on the fundamental idea that we're all in it together.

But there's one notable thing speakers at the DNC barely did: lie.

Speaker after speaker stood up to praise the president's record and critique Mitt Romney's rhetoric with the sort of straightforward honesty that Americans should expect from political campaigns.  That’s not to say the campaign didn’t spin the facts.  Every political campaign massages the truth toward its own advantage and the Obama campaign is no different. But unlike Republicans who spouted known lie after known lie at their convention, pretty much every assertion at the DNC can be traced to some kernel of truth.

When, in his DNC speech, the president accused Mitt Romney of wanting to hand over Social Security to Wall Street, while it’s true that the Romney campaign has denied this agenda currently, the fact is both Romney and Paul Ryan supported privatizing Social Security in the past.

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During coverage of the DNC on Thursday night, Fox News used R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," apparently without permission. R.E.M.'s music publisher Warner-Tamerlane Music demanded that the network stop using the song, according to a post on R.E.M.'s website.

Former frontman Michael Stipe said in the post: "We have little or no respect for their puff adder brand of reportage. Our music does not belong there."

Via Towleroad.

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The circumstances leading up to Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s benediction last night were politically fraught, but they didn’t have to be. First, Mitt Romney announced Dolan would be giving the closing benediction at the Republican National Convention. (At the time, I wrote that the move signaled Dolan had chosen sides with the GOP. Nothing he said last night seemed to suggest otherwise.) Under fire from fellow Catholics and others, and in an effort to appear nonpartisan, Dolan offered to perform the same function in Charlotte. While some observers have argued that Dolan was backed into a corner and working from a position of weakness — he needed the Democrats to give him cover from the charges of partisanship — the Democrats looked like the ones in the position of weakness. They couldn’t, after all, say no.

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