Missing McCain

There was only one candidate, so it makes sense that Barack drew about half of a normal debate audience for his infomercial last night.

Barack Obama's campaign "infomercial" drew 26.4 million viewers to three major networks, proving modestly more popular than typical prime-time programing, preliminary figures showed on Thursday.

The Democratic presidential candidate's 30-minute message on Wednesday night garnered 2.1 million more viewers on CBS, NBC and Fox combined than those three networks drew in the same half-hour last Wednesday, according to Nielsen Media Research.

For NBC and CBS, the Obama ad marked an audience bump of 43 percent and 11 percent respectively over last week's action drama "Knight Rider" (7 million viewers) and the sitcom "The New Adventures of Old Christine" (7.8 million).

Fox did better last week with its World Series pre-game broadcast -- 9.6 million viewers.

So the main problem for Barack was that he didn't invite John McCain to join him.

The infomercial drew fewer than half the 57.4 million viewers averaged by the three recent presidential debates between Obama and Republican rival John McCain which aired on 11 commercial networks in all.

Of course, it's not about how many watched, but who. If it was a crowd of worshippers, than it does him no good. Independents and undecideds were his goal.