We’ll see you in Charlotte! 

For several members of Mitt Romney’s home-state delegation, who had been rooting for the former Massachusetts governor since his first White House run, Thursday night had particular meaning.

“The part that exhilarates me — him being from Massahusetts — a lot of us know incidents in the state where he’s been a perfect leader, a perfect family man,” said Jim Tsika, a 64-year-old business owner and former math and physics teacher from Bridgewater, Mass. ”It’s nice to see it recognized.”

What’s different this time around compared to four years ago that led Romney to win the GOP nod?

“Most of the conversation in 2008 centered not so much around the economy but foreign policy,” Tsika said. ” This time, I think it’s clearly the economy.”

Janet Garon, a 58-year-old retiree from Sturbridge, Mass., said of 2008: “Maybe the time just wasn’t right then.”

This time, she said, “the economy’s No. 1.”

“He’s an administrator. He understands business. After all, the government is a big business — it works for the people,” she said.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney waves after he finishes his address at the 2012 Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 30, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

When Mitt Romney strode onto a windswept New Hampshire farm last summer to begin his presidential bid, he spoke about jobs and taxes and a restoration of American might. What he didn’t talk about was himself.

It took another 455 days, when he stepped Thursday night onto a soft wooden stage designed to evoke a living room, for Romney to offer America a look inside himself.

Read the whole thing.

Those in the hall probably couldn’t hear it, but as he ended his prayer, Cardinal Timothy Dolan could be clearly heard over C-SPAN’s feed asking House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio): “Was that short enough?”

Another question to ponder: Will Dolan give the exact same closing prayer next week when he’s slated to close the Democratic National Convention?

One of the most quoted politicians at the Republican national convention over the last three days was a Democrat — President Obama himself.

 His “you didn’t build that” remark, which many observers point out has been taken largely out of context, became a mantra for almost every speaker on the first day of the convention. “We Built It” was the day’s official theme.

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Balloons and confetti drop on the crowd as Romney’s family joins him on stage. (JONATHAN CAPEHART / THE WASHINGTON POST)

After a night filled with speakers who attested to Mitt Romney’s excellence in all aspects of life — family, faith, business, politics — the man himself hit all the same notes.

He spoke of his marriage and his parents (including a heart-wrenching story of how his mother discovered his father was dead), his own children, his religion and his career. He even tied the latter two together, when talking about not investing his church’s pension fund in Bain Capital: “I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors’ money, I didnt want to go to hell too.” 

But his focus was President Obama, and it was on that topic that he delivered his many memorable lines.

“This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault,” he said. “This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right. But this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office. America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith. But today, the time has come to turn the page.”

Here’s the full speech.

“I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour.” This is one of Romney’s signature lines, but in a lengthy column last year, we tracked down every statement Obama uttered that partisans claim was an apology, and concluded that each one had been misquoted or taken out of context. His comments were not much different than his predecessor, former President George W. Bush  

Indeed, on several occasions Bush apologized to foreign governments for actions taken by U.S. soldiers, such as for the shooting of a Koran or prisoner abuse in Iraq. “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families,” Bush said at a news conference with Jordan’s King Abdullah.

Despite earning Four Pinocchios for months, Romney keeps saying this.

WATCH: Live streaming video of the final presidential debate

Romney waited until near the end of his speech to make any reference to foreign policy, and then devoted barely a dozen sentences–one of them crediting President Obama for ordering the attack on Osama bin Laden– to a repetition of general campaign themes.

He again charged Obama with an “apology tour” of the world that Obama never made.

The President, he said, had “thrown allies like Israel under the bus, even as he relaxed sanctions on Castro’s Cuba. He abandoned our friends in Poland by walking away from our missile defense committments, but is eager to give Russia’s President Putin the flexibility he desires.”

He again charged Obama with talking to Iran, rather than stopping its nuclear program but did not say how he would do it.

Romney claimed “the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan,” but did not mention the war in Afghanistan, where about 90,000 U.S. troops are still serving.

“And unlike the president, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs.” — Mitt Romney

This sounds like a pretty bold statement, especially considering that only two presidents—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—created more than 12 million jobs. Romney, in fact, says he can reach this same goal, in just four years, though the policy paper issued by his campaign contains few details. It is mostly a collection of policy assertions, such as such as reducing debt, overhauling the tax code, fostering free trade and so forth.

But, in fact, the number is less impressive than it sounds. This pledge amounts to an average of 250,000 jobs a month, a far cry from the 500,000 jobs a month that Romney claimed would be created in a “normal recovery.” In recent months, the economy has averaged about 150,000 jobs a month.

The Congressional Budget Office is required to consider the effects of the so-called “fiscal cliff” if a year-end budget deal is not reached, which many experts believe would push the country into a recession. But even with that caveat, the nonpartisan agency assumes 9.6 million jobs will be created in the next four years. (This is a revision downward; CBO had estimated 11 million in January.)

But Moody’s Analytics, in an August forecast, predicts 12 million jobs will be created by 2016, no matter who is president. (See page 51.) And Macroeconomic Advisors in April also predicted a gain of 12.3 million jobs.

In other words, this is a fairly safe bet by Romney, even if he has a somewhat fuzzy plan for action. We have often noted that presidents are often at the mercy—or the beneficiary—of broad economic trends, and Romney’s pledge appears to be an effort to take advantage of that.

As Mitt Romney was preparing to accept the Republican nomination for president, demonstrators in Washington, D.C. shut down a busy intersection Thursday night, holding a sit-in to protest GOP policies.

The Post’s Tim Craig reports that about 200 protesters affiliated with the activist group “Our DC” marched from Meridan Hill Park to 14th and U streets NW, where they sat in the intersection. While a band played music, the group chanted slogans against Romney. Police were forced to close both 14th and U streets, two major routes through Northwest Washington, for about 30 minutes before they moved the group to the sidewalk shortly before 10 p.m.

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