If you had told me last week that John McCain's speech would be seen by more people than Barack Obama's speech, I would have called you nuts. Obama is an excellent public speaker and he was clearly in his element. He delivered a great speech for the Democrats. McCain is not known for his speaking skills, and yet Nielsen suggests that McCain's speech was seen by more people.
How did this happen?
I think it's possible that some people who were watching the defending Super Bowl Champion Giants open the NFL season against the Washington Redskins and stuck around for the McCain speech on NBC.
Still, it's quite an achievement for McCain, and on the whole, the GOP got more eyeballs to see their ticket go through the motions of their acceptance speeches than the Democrats did of their tandem of Biden and Obama.
The trick, of course, is converting those eyeballs into people who will vote for them. That's far from a sealed deal, even as overnight polls suggest that McCain is going to receive a significant bounce from the polls.
The numbers are good for what they are, but let's not forget that there's two months and a whole lot of work and time before the real poll that counts for all the marbles is taken. That's the November general election, and these polls may work wonders and make folks feel good, but they are fleeting.
Just ask John Kerry in 2004. Or Al Gore. Or even Dewey.
Both parties have a lot of work ahead of them, and both will do their best to try and win the election. We'll get to hear more about the policies of the Obama/Biden team, which has claimed that the McCain/Palin team was short on specifics - ignoring their own vacuous and empty rhetoric of hope and change.
McCain should get a significant bounce from the Palin pick, and they need to parlay that into tangible results over the next few weeks in soothing GOP supporters and moderates alike. Palin lets McCain be Mavericky, while she can provide the red meat. McCain has to hope that there aren't any real scandals in Palin's closet - or maybe he's secretly hoping that the media so overplays its hand that they will increase support for her out of sympathy. I don't think a politician looks gift votes any differently than serious support. A vote is a vote.
Obama has to hope that Biden doesn't stick his foot in his mouth. He has to worry about whether Biden can bring the crowds and support that matches Palin. Matching up against Palin is a problem, and his campaign is continuing to try and make the argument that Palin has less experience than Obama - a lose-lose argument in every sense of the term.
The Obama campaign has plenty of time to come back and figure out how to deal with Palin, and their initial answer beyond the denigration of Palin's position as Governor of Alaska, is to send in a bunch of Democratic governors and legislators to attack Palin's position.
That too will backfire because people see through this - why does Obama or Biden need to put a different face on going after Palin, are they not strong or sophisticated enough to make the argument themselves? And one has to wonder why Obama didn't put one of these women on the ticket instead of Biden. It's almost as though Obama has to hide Biden from crowds because of the Palin factor.
That too goes to the judgments at the top of the tickets. Biden was a safe and unoffensive choice, but it was uninspiring. McCain went against conventional wisdom and picked someone no one would have expected. It shows original thinking and not playing within the usual rules. That's a bonus when you want to be C-in-C.
UPDATE:
Case in point: Gallup shows Obama ahead, but losing his lead.
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