The Clint Eastwood vaudeville was always going to be a tough act to follow but Romney started strongly enough with a moment of emotional authenticity.
Four years ago, after accepting that John McCain was going to beat him to the 2008 Republican nomination, Mitt Romney returned to Boston and the drawing board, determined to rebuild his political career from the bottom up.
"I've run for office three times, losing twice, winning once," he reflected. "Each time when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn't done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say." At the Tampa Bay Times Forum, Romney was given a huge opportunity to finish that job, but, as always with Romney the politician - as opposed to the businessman - he didn't quite seal the deal.
The Clint Eastwood vaudeville was always going to be a tough act to follow but Romney started strongly enough with a moment of emotional authenticity. Briefly, he appeared almost overwhelmed by the welcome from the Republican Party faithful and twice his voice choked with emotion as he recalled the love of his parents, the joy and hard work of raising five sons - and the emptiness they left behind. "Those weren't the easiest of days - too many long hours and weekends working, five young sons who seemed to have this need to re-enact a different world war every night," he said. "But if you ask Ann and I what we'd give, to break up just one more fight between the boys, or wake up in the morning and discover a pile of kids asleep in our room."
Guileless stories like these were the upside of Romney having apparently written the speech himself.
But there was a definite downside. Forty minutes is a long time to hold an audience on prime-time television and for periods of this speech the delegates in the convention seemed to glaze over as Romney delivered his message in dense, mazy prose. They wanted passion and verve but for much of the time Romney served up election boilerplate: well-worn promises to create jobs and a checklist of firms successfully rescued during his time with Bain & Company.
When he tried to change up a gear from his standard sales conference delivery, the rhetoric sounded like speechmaking by numbers. "Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, 'I'm an American. I make my destiny. And we deserve better! My children deserve better! My family deserves better. My country deserves better!"
Romney's difficulty is not just the nasty names his opponents call him, but the shortage of nice things supporters can think of to say about their own man. Mitt is "great", they say, or at least he's "better than Obama", but always with that question mark over whether that will be good enough come November.
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