Ratings 2

UPDATE: Now the AP is saying the results are a Florida-2000-style tie.

Nielsen said that 38.9 million people watched McCain accept the GOP nomination Thursday on either ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC. PBS, which has a more imprecise estimate based on samples in a few big cities, said 3.5 million watched on its network.

Last week, Obama's speech in Denver was seen by 38.4 million on 10 different commercial networks, and an additional 4 million on PBS.

Add it up, and that's McCain, 42.4 million, to Obama, 42.4 million.

It's being reported that John McCain's speech beat Obama's in the ratings. Neilsen's methodology can be pretty questionable in cases like this—first, because these are just preliminary numbers, and second because in any event I'm pretty sure there were significantly more Obama viewing parties last week than McCain viewing parties this week—but regardless, if McCain did beat him, that's not too bad. The speech was pretty terrible; we should hope a lot of people saw it.

The best take yet I've seen is Jesse Taylor's, echoing mine:

The goal of a McCain presidency is to get McCain in office. The end policy goal is to prove that McCain can work with others. The measure of success is how validated McCain can make his belief in himself. His speech last night wasn’t awful, it just lacked any ideological perspective beyond McCain’s faith in his own biography.

Another case in point.



(image via Cynical-C)