McCain's Speech Tonight

I have to confess that I only listened to his speech (I am staying at a professor's house here in Clemson and I couldn't figure out how to get his TV to work), so possibly it came off better if one could see it, but I found large portions of the talk boring. The list of couples that he wanted to help in different parts of the country seemed to be meaningless. I am not even sure in most of those cases how he was saying that he would help them (the one exception was the military person who had died in Iraq). The notion that McCain made about we wouldn't have the bickering in Washington if politicians were there to serve the people and not their own interests, was simply silly, if romantic. The reason that there is a big battle is because so much is at stake. If you want to solve that problem, you need to make the government smaller.

On the other hand, McCain is probably the first president to so openly endorse vouchers for education. I also liked McCain's statement that he couldn't wait to introduce Palin to Washington.

McCain may not be a flashy speaker and his content may only be OK, but at least he has Palin on his team. It may be a while before her true impact becomes clear.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's highly anticipated speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night nearly matched the record-setting numbers of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Palin pulled in 37.2 million viewers across broadcast and cable networks, according to Nielsen Media Research.

That's 55% higher than Day 3 of the DNC, when her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, and President Clinton took the stage (24 million).

It's also up a sharp 99% from the Republican convention's third day in 2004 (18.7 million) and easily bests the numbers viewers attracted by George W. Bush when he accepted the nomination (27.6 million). In fact, it came close to upsetting Obama's historic address last Thursday -- the most-watched convention speech in history (38.4 million viewers).