There are many ways to interpret the hard data behind this story, several of which I have tried to address at:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/08/beyond-entertainment.html

The pageant government is one thing, the permanent government is quite another. The best thing that can be said about the presidency is that it sets a national cultural tone. The worst thing that can said about the presidency is that it sets a national cultural tone. How quickly the politics of hope can morph into the politics of fear. Of course I maybe wrong on this, but I do think that a majority of voters reach their decision on who to vote for through emotional judgments. Why else would so much rhetoric and images be employed and in so many different ways?
Hope and Fear are two punches straight to the gut. It is foolish to speaker of a candidate as desperate. Politics by its very nature, is a very desperate business, always.
Politicians are the motivational speakers of the bewildered.

Article quote: “The ratings dwarfed the audience for the Summer Olympics and the season finale of “American Idol” in May, and added to what was already a sense of buoyancy within the Obama campaign that the night had gone better than planned.”

Dwarfed the Olympics AND American Idol….hmmm…

It seems to me people ARE sincere in their effort to find out where their country is headed. Too bad this gala, better know as the Democratic Convention, was only one small sampling of that endeavor.

For those who would like a broader view than just campaign rhetoric, try this article:

“Long gone are the days when the selection of a vice-presidential candidate by one of the two major big business parties involved a complex balancing act between various institutional forces. In the Democratic Party, this would have involved consultations with trade union officials, civil rights organizations, congressional leaders and the heads of particularly powerful state and urban political machines.

Today, neither party has any substantial popular base. In both parties there is only one true “constituency”: the financial aristocracy that dominates economic and political life and controls the mass media, and whose interests determine government policy, both foreign and domestic. The selection of Biden, the senator from a small state with only three electoral votes, whose own presidential bids have failed miserably for lack of popular support, underscores the immense chasm separating the entire political establishment from the broad mass of the American people.

Obama has selected Biden to provide reassurance that, whatever populist rhetoric may be employed for electoral purposes in the fall campaign, the wealth and privileges of the ruling elite and the geo-strategic aims of US imperialism will be the single-minded concerns of a Democratic administration.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9974