Viewing numbers for the second night of the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., are out and it’s not particularly good news for the party.

Some 21.5 million people watched the Republican convention Tuesday night, Nielsen reported this afternoon, down slightly from the 22.1 million who watched second night coverage four years ago.

By comparison, almost 26 million people watched the second night of the Democratic convention last week, when Hillary Clinton addressed the crowd.

Via notorious liberal hate site Daily Kos.

UPDATE: Live by ratings, die by ratings:
37,244,000 WATCHED PALIN SPEECH ... [24,029,000 WATCHED BIDEN; 38,379,000 WATCHED OBAMA]

How many will watch McCain tonight?

Big numbers: Obama's speech at the DNC last night was seen by more than 38 million people.

Nielsen Media Research said more people watched Obama speak than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final "American Idol" or the Academy Awards this year. Obama talked before a live audience of 80,000 people in Denver.

His TV audience nearly doubled the amount of people who watched John Kerry accept the Democratic nomination to run against President Bush four years ago. Kerry's speech was seen by just over 20 million people.

Obama's audience might be higher, since Nielsen didn't have an estimate for how many people watched Obama on PBS or C-SPAN Thursday night.

Obama about to take the stage.

Here's the speech, as prepared for delivery.

Return of the King: Whoever would have thought, way way back in the year 2000, that I would someday come to admire Al Gore this much.

Here's the text.

More convention scuttlebutt: Brian Schweitzer's well-received speech on energy was largely improvised after the Montana governor felt that the crowd hadn't been revved up enough.

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer said his show-stealing speech Tuesday night, which brought the crowd in Denver to its feet and made him the talk of the convention, was a last-minute improvisation that departed from the prepared remarks he'd agreed on with the Obama campaign.

"We had a convention that went through the first day and didn't get anybody fired up," said Schweitzer, who spoke on the second evening after keynote speaker Mark Warner of Virginia. "We didn't have anybody stand up, and we didn't have anybody get excited," he said.

"Sometimes you go to the line and you say, 'Let's go,'" he said in a brief interview after appearing on a Politico/Yahoo!/Denver Post panel at the Denver Athletic Club.

Lots of well-deserved praise on the blogotubes for John Kerry's speech last night.

Steve Benen
Matt Yglesias
Ezra Klein
Josh Marshall (and again)

But the best is from Jason Zengerle, who writes in The New Republic on "the strange resurrection of John Kerry":

For those who remember Kerry as a lackluster and ham-fisted presidential candidate, this emergence has come as a surprise. "There's a wholeheartedness to [Kerry speaking about Obama] and a total lack of hesitancy and calculation that he always seems to have when he's speaking about himself," says one Democratic consultant. "A year ago, if you had asked [Obama strategists] David Axelrod and David Plouffe if they thought Kerry would be an important surrogate, they'd have laughed. But he's been fucking good." Kerry is even winning compliments from across the aisle. "If Kerry had conducted himself like this four years ago," says Republican strategist John Weaver, "he might have been elected president."

Indeed, Obama's "clean break" from the national past, as Kerry called it in his endorsement speech, seems to be a clean break for Kerry as well. Which is yet another surprise. Given the abuse Kerry took from his party following his defeat, one might have expected him this time around to sit on the sidelines and sulk. Instead he's done the opposite, looking to Obama as a vehicle for his own rehabilitation. Which leads to the question: In trying to help Obama overcome Clinton and now McCain, will John Kerry at long last be able to overcome himself?

Or maybe they're doing everything right: PRINCETON, NJ -- Democratic candidate Barack Obama has gained ground in the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking average from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and now leads Republican John McCain among registered voters by a 48% to 42% margin.



Thus, the current three-day average would reflect any impact of Monday night's speech by Michelle Obama, and Tuesday night's speech by Hillary Clinton, but would not completely reflect Wednesday night's lineup of speakers, such as John Kerry, former President Bill Clinton, and vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, nor the appearance on stage at the end of the evening by Barack Obama himself.

As fladem at Open Left points out, this bounce (if it holds) is already a larger polling bump that Kerry received at any point during or after the DNC Convention in 2004.

Here is a chart of the RCP Poll of Polls from 2004.



The small, three-point jump for Kerry at the start of August was the Democratic National Convention, accompanied (oddly) by a concurrent small rise in Bush's numbers.

The five-point jump for Bush at the end of the month was of course the Republican National Convention, accompanied by a three-point drop in Kerry's numbers. You can see that gap start to narrow again almost immediately, but it was never enough.

Analogies between any two election years are almost always useless—but if I could link to the Three Guys politics blog I was doing in 2004 you would see how impressed I was with the Democratic National Convention, which seemed to quite literally do everything right. I left Boston feeling confident and completely energized, strongly behind a candidate who had been my third choice (at best) in the primary. But we lost, and we lost at least in part because the Republicans went to their convention, wore Purple Heart Band-Aids, and told the world what an asshole John Kerry is over and over again in every speech for four straight days.

The Republican Party may be a cancer in the colon of American democracy, but it knows how to win presidential elections. Democrats really don't.

2004's convention gave us Obama and a lot of hope and excitement and a lot of great speeches, but we lost. I think it's fair to start to wonder whether we're managing to lose again with an aimless, largely messageless, far too bloodless convention that in every respect but the prime-time speeches was significantly more lackluster than 2004's. Only last night had any real bite, and even then I still heard in each of the major speeches that John McCain is an American hero we must all deeply admire.

I'll be the first to admit that whenever I've questioned Obama's strategy in the past he and his people have turned out to be right, or at least right enough—but suffice it to say a whole lot is riding on Obama tonight, and I hope to hell he's able to deliver.

Here's the Biden speech. I find that I'm happier and happier with this choice as time goes on, though I almost can't listen to Biden talk for fear he's going to say something stupid and completely ruin the election.



McCain VP selection said to be made, to be announced Friday morning...

Tonight was the first night of the Democratic National Convention that was better in its entirety on C-SPAN than abbreviated on the networks. (Too bad I had to miss most of it.) Aside from the big, primetime speeches, the first two nights were fairly disappointing affairs—too much light, not enough heat—but tonight things at last began to come together. Clinton, Biden, and Kerry each in their own ways took the fight to McCain, and all three were extremely effective, and for the first time we finally look like a political party and not a Hatsfield/McCoy reunion.

After two weak nights, I'm feeling better.

Here's Clinton's speech. I'll try and put Biden and Kerry up as they appear on the blogs...



UPDATE: John Kerry—almost certainly the least-watched, but I loved the Senator McCain vs. Candidate McCain stuff. (He had definitely some fun with the "Talk about being for it before you were against it" line.)



It's almost cliché to ask of Kerry, "Where was this guy four years ago?" but seriously, where was he?

Everybody's raving about Brian Schweitzer, who managed to get the crowd fired up about energy and about Obama after Warner put them to sleep. (Everybody! Benen, Marshall, Kos, Giordano.)

One of the still-underappreciated stories of this election, I think, is the national hunger for a honest conversation about energy and the environment, something we've been entirely denied by coal-industry-sponsored debates in the primaries and Exxon-sponsored convention coverage in the general.



In the cheap seats, stand up!

Bruce won't be playing the DNC after all. Which is why I'm voting for McCain.

So, Mark Warner kind of really sucked. There's nobody who could have hoped to follow Barack's 2004 barnburner, and anticipation for Hillary has sucked all the air out of the room—but that was a snoozer. I guess it's a good thing no one listens to me...

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow agrees: "Apparently Mark Warner visited us from the future, and in the future there is no Democratic Party." Spot on. Really, really, really really bad.

She also points out that Warner's failure ups the stakes for Hillary significantly. I agree: she absolutely needs to take the hammer to McCain tonight in a big way to regain her credibility with the Obama wing of the party. He's given her an opening by using her in this week's ads—that was a huge tactical error on his part—and now she can move both her die-hard supporters and the debate-at-large towards Obama by hitting McCain tonight and hitting him hard.

It's made-for-TV. It writes itself.

And for what it's worth, I think she will, if only because a nice and fiery anti-McCain speech tonight is just about the only way, in the unlikely event Obama loses, she could ever hope to have the support of someone like me in 2012.

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum agree. Here's Ezra:

For what it's worth, my hunch is Clinton will own the convention. What she needs to do in this speech is so easy and so obvious and will be greeted with such gratitude by the Democratic Party and such rapturous coverage by the media that it's almost inconceivable that she'll pass up the opportunity to be the hero.

Bob Casey does better in two sentences than just about anyone I've seen at the DNC: "John McCain calls himself a maverick, but he's voted with George Bush over 90% of the time. That's not a maverick, that's a sidekick." Hell yes. The four-more-months chant was pretty good, too—too bad no one's watching yet.

Michelle Obama finished speaking not too long ago. She's been called Barack's secret weapon, and she clearly is—that was one of the better-delivered political speeches I've ever seen, especially given the difficult dual contexts of rehabilitating Michelle's public image and winning over still-suspicious Hillary voters. She was quite literally perfect.

I was almost too nervous to watch the Ted Kennedy tribute and speech; contrary to the way I saw it described on television, it seemed to me that Kennedy was extremely frail and liable to collapse at any moment.

But perhaps the most serious news tonight is the revelation of an apparent assassination plot: at first it seemed to be merely two meth addicts with rifles, but now "at least" four people are under arrest...