Obama Hits One Out of the Park
October 28, 2008, 2:00PM
Major League Baseball has just announced that the final three innings of Game 5 of the World Series will be resume at 8:37pm on Wednesday night. The game was suspended on account of the weather, with the score knotted at 2-2. The Tampa Bay Rays must win this game to stave off elimination and send the series back down to Tampa.
As I noted this morning, there's probably no man in America happier about all this than David Axelrod. And it's not (just) because the passionate Cubs fan has it in for the Phillies. Rather, it's because Obama's roadblocked half-hour program is set to air on CBS, NBC, and FOX on Wednesday night (ABC dithered until it missed its chance). That's why the usual start-time of the game on Fox has been pushed from 8:20 to 8:37pm. The Series delivers high ratings in some hard-to-reach demographics, but is a particularly big draw in the teams' home markets. For Game 1, also on a Wednesday night, 31.57% of all households in Tampa/St. Pete tuned in, as well as 35.7% of households in the Philadelphia media market. (It also played extraordinarily well in Orlanda, Ft. Myers, and West Palm Beach.) That's an awful lot of swing-state viewers who'll turn on their televisions to catch the start of the game, and find Obama delivering his closing message. Enough to make even a long-suffering Cubs fan find a little love for the neophyte Rays.
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