Campaigns Begin Dash To Election

by The Huffington Post News Team [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

Fresh off back-to-back conventions, the two presidential campaigns took off Friday on a 60-day dash to the White House in a political landscape reshaped by the candidacy of Gov. Sarah Palin and Republican efforts to seize the mantle of change.

The race, transformed by zeal among the Republican base for Senator John McCain's running mate, got a burst of new life at the same time that television viewership numbers showed that nearly 40 million people, a record for an American political convention, tuned to the major broadcast and cable-news networks to watch Mr. McCain's acceptance speech in St. Paul on Thursday night. That was a bit more than those who watched Senator Barack Obama's speech in Denver last week.