First off, if you missed The Speech (or just want to watch it again), you can watch it at Political Carnival. The Washington Post also has the speech, plus a sort of tweet-annotated transcript. There’s another transcript-as-delivered here. Don’t bother with speech-as-prepared-for-delivery transcripts, since Big Bill spoke off the cuff so much I understand the teleprompter operator gave up before the speech was over.

Andrew Rosenthal:

Watching Bill Clinton take the stage at the Democratic National Convention and take over the room with his first few, simple words – “We are here to nominate a President and I’ve got one in mind” — was like watching a great violinist follow a group of gifted amateurs.

It occurs to me that the Obama campaign can fire their advertising people and just run clips of Bill Clinton’s speech for the rest of the campaign. Even if they don’t do that, I have no doubt we will be seeing a barrage of Big Bill videos over the next few hours.

Charles Pierce:

So that was actually three things. Anyway, what struck me most was how much Arkansas we’re-heah-to-nominate-a-president-I-got-one-in-mahnd he let into his voice. As Chuck Berry once put it, the man was campaign-shoutin’ like a Southern diplomat. (How much you want to bet that the man once owned a coffee-colored Cadillac, and that he knows at least five women named Nadine?) G’s were dropped all over the stage. The ad-libs were all tossed off in that wonderful character we’ve come to know as the smartest little boy around the cracker barrel. Willard Romney was out there somewhere and he was being utterly eviscerated by Floyd The Barber. And the only people who look more ridiculous than he does the morning after are all those media brainiacs who were saying how smart the Republicans were being in “driving a wedge” between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. There is a reason you should be careful what you wish for.

You might have missed this, but about a month ago Dick Morris confidently predicted that Bill Clinton would vote for Mitt Romney. In a kind of good Democrat-bad Democrat routine, Romney has been insinuating that he is President Clinton’s heir, and more like Clinton than President Obama is like Clinton.

Just yesterday, before The Speech, Paul Ryan said,

“My guess is we will get a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s, but we’re not going to hear much about how things have been the last four years,” Ryan told the crowd outside the Dallas County Courthouse. “And, by the way, under President Clinton, we got welfare reform. Chuck Grassley, everybody else in Congress — we got welfare reform, which moved people from welfare to work to get people out of poverty. President Obama is rolling back welfare reform.”

Oh, the video possibilities are endless. It will be interesting to see if the Romney-Ryan “welfare” ads stay on the air; all the Dems have to do to kill that snake is to run ads of Big Bill rebutting it.

Michael Tomasky:

An interesting thing about the speech: At the beginning, over Twitter, we were fed the usual diet of snarky conservative comments. That’s fine. We liberals tossed off some snarky tweets last week during the Tampa convention. That’s how it goes, and some of them are funny even when you disagree with them.

But the funny thing was, over the course of the speech, those tweets became fewer in number. Then they disappeared. That’s when you can tell the other side is worried. Clinton reached people. He revved up the base, but he did a lot more than that.

Today the Right is in full sour grapes mode, callng the speech “long” and even “a swing and a miss.”

Sometime last night, Ari Melber tweeted “RNC gave us Eastwooding, DNC offers Clintoning, a fact-driven, policy argument presented to voters like they are thinking adults.” And Matt Latimer wrote at Daily Beast,

Here’s why I think Clinton’s speech was successful: He did what almost no one at the Republican convention tried to do, what few conventions bother to do anymore. He treated the American people like thinking human beings.

The only downside I see for President Obama is that it’s doubtful he can match the excitement created by Big Bill. But I could be wrong.