It was very good. His speech was well written and he is a good speaker. The audience loved it (of course).

The positive impact of the speech will probably be balanced by the wall-to-wall coverage of the republican convention next week, especially with the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s VP candidate.

A couple of the comments I’ve read express it better than I can:

From Daily Kos:

“Gay marriage, guns, abortion, social security, and more. When you touch the third, fourth, fifth and six rails of American politics in your acceptance speech, that’s gutsy. And brilliant.”

From Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish:

“What he didn’t do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again … and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

“He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn’t shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.”