According to Nielsen Media Research, approximately 37.2 million viewers tuned in for Palin’s speech, an astoundingly large number for a speech by someone who is not a presidential candidate.

The viewership was just a million lesser than that of Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last week and it surpassed the viewership of Joe Biden’s last speech, which attracted 24 million viewers, by a comfortable margin.

“She’s a great story, and she’s very good on television,” CBS political analyst Jeff Greenfield said. “What she did Wednesday night was the classic, archetypal, all-American tale: Spunky small-town girl comes to the big city, takes on the big shots and wins.”

“She’s very good, relaxed, comfortable with the camera,” Greenfield said. “There was one point when the TelePrompTer was eating the first sentence of every paragraph of the speech, and she just rolled with it. The joke about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull being lipstick, that was not in the text. She ad-libbed it perfectly.”

“You’ve got a triple novelty,” Goldstein, a Saint Louis University law professor and the author of “The Modern American Vice Presidency: The Transformation of a Political Institution”, said. “No. 1, it’s a Republican woman, and No. 2, a total unknown, and No. 3, my God, she’s from Alaska, an unknown and esoteric state.”