Mitt Romney accepted the Republican nomination for president Wednesday, with one of the best delivered speeches of his political career, telling stories about his parents, joking about President Obama's infamous "heal the planet" remark, and linking the president to Jimmy Carter. Here are the five best lines of Romney's convention speech:
1. 'You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him'
"But for too many Americans, these good days are harder to come by. How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?
"Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him."
2. 'My promise is to help you and your family'
"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise…is to help you and your family."
3. 'I didn't want to go to hell, too'
"When I was 37, I helped start a small company. My partners and I had been working for a company that was in the business of helping other businesses.
"So some of us had this idea that if we really believed our advice was helping companies, we should invest in companies. We should bet on ourselves and on our advice.
"So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn’t get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church’s pension fund to invest, but I didn’t. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors’ money, but I didn’t want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him."
4. 'Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president.'
"That is why every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction: 'You are better off today than you were four years ago.'
"Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president."
5. 'That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died – she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.'
"Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist – because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died – she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.
"My mom and dad were true partners, a life lesson that shaped me by everyday example. When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way. I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, 'Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?'"