Barack Obama

If you haven't done so already, you should stop right now and read a piece by another young journalist from Baltimore, “Fear of a Black President,” the September cover story by The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates. I'm serious. It's really good. Here's a paragraph break so that you know where to pick this up. Welcome back. Now as you'll recall, Mr. Coates points out the irony of America's first black president barely mentioning the subject of race at all. It's certainly an issue for other people.

The Oval Office isn't the place to learn on the job. That was the line from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008. In fairness, that's always the argument the more experienced candidate uses against the less experienced candidate (just ask Mitt Romney). But Barack Obama seemed a special case, easily among the least experienced major-party nominees in U.S. history. A Pew poll in August 2008 found that the biggest concern voters had with Mr. Obama fell under the category of "personal abilities and experience.

Presidents get the praise or blame for everything that happens on their watch, but, as Barack Obama has learned, the things the commander-in-chief can actually command are limited in number, thanks to James Madison and Newt Gingrich. Madison and his brilliant colleagues who invented the American system of government disagreed about many things, but they fervently agreed about one big thing: The coercive power of government needed to be held in check. They accomplished this by spreading the power around between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

According to letter writer Rani Merryman's reasoning ("Romney is a leader, Sept. 8), President Barack Obama promised unity but failed to unite the two political parties. In my way of thinking, Mr. Obama cannot be faulted for the results of a stone-walling obstructionism with which Republicans in Congress met him from day one. While in Mr. Obama's bid for the presidency a short three and a half years ago, his platform featured an important goal of breaking the existing gridlock in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that "the main goal of the Republican party is to make Obama a one-term president.

In his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama neatly transformed the hope and change of 2008 that centered on him into a voter-centered hope and change for 2012. "So you see, the election four years ago wasn't about me," the president said. "It was about you. My fellow citizens -- you were the change. "You're the reason there's a little girl with a heart disorder in Phoenix who'll get the surgery she needs because an insurance company can't limit her coverage.

Columnist Leonard Pitts wrote a story for the front page of last Sunday's Charlotte Observer indicting both parties for failing to speak up for the poor. He inspired this column. I could be writing the expected narrative from a conservative at the Democratic National Convention but have chosen instead to acknowledge that Mr. Pitts, though a lefty, is right. If the Democrats and Republicans aren't talking about the greater goal of helping the poor become un-poor (rather than just sending them a check to sustain them in their poverty)

In his letter, William Smith writes that Rep. Paul Ryan lied in his convention speech regarding the GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin ("No denying Ryan's lying," Sept. 5). The facts are that Mr. Ryan categorized the plant in these exact words, that it was a plant "we were about to lose. " By saying they were about to lose the plant, Mr. Ryan acknowledged that the plant was already scheduled to be shut down when candidate Barack Obama visited it in 2008. Therefore, it is ridiculous to claim that he was making the charge that the plant was closed because of something President Obama didn't do. No, the point of the statement was that candidate Obama visited the plant and said, "I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.

- Arguing that he needs more time to fix the nation's sluggish economy, President Barack Obama formally accepted his party's nomination for a second term Thursday while stressing that voters will face a stark choice in November that could affect their lives for decades to come. The Democratic incumbent laid out a series of goals for the economy - most of them familiar - and repeatedly said his policies would take middle-class families down a vastly different path than those of his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

Democrats and Republicans can surely agree on one thing - if the presidential election were a popularity contest (which it isn't, as Al Gore famously observed when he ran against the affable George W. Bush), the current incumbent would be a shoo-in for reelection. No offense to Ann and Mitt Romney, but if there's one thing that Barack and Michelle Obama have, it's star power, a point made clear early in the Democratic National Convention. But President Obama isn't running for class president or Homecoming King.

Barack Obama has given some great speeches since his national debut as the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Don't expect his speech Thursday night in Charlotte to be one of them. This is not a moment to announce his arrival on the national political scene. Nor will this speech be anything like the Philadelphia speech of May 2008, where he explained how racial identity shaped his life and the fate of the nation. Because asking to be returned to the Oval Office for a second term is a task quite different from asking for the first four years, Thursday's speech may not even look much like Mr. Obama's acceptance speech four years ago at Denver's Invesco Field.