Change Comes From The Bottom Up

No way for the AP wire to spin this:

NEW YORK (AP) - Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention 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.

So -- 40 million? Maybe more? In prime time, when TV's stars come out to shine?

More people than voted in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. 2/3 of the number of people who voted in the 2004 Presidential election.

It's harder to get people out to vote than it is to get them to turn on the television. But if McCain's people thought that by announcing their VP pick this afternoon, that most people wouldn't catch the speech and that nobody would be talking or thinking about the convention any more, they were dead wrong.