Tomorrow night Barack Obama will go on TV for 30 minutes at 8:00 pm EST and according the Associated Press in the United Kingdom it will delay the world series game.
The UK Associated Press article -
Obama ad to delay baseball final
Barack Obama is to become the first presidential candidate in 16 years to air a 30-minute primetime ‘infomercial’ on US television networks.
The rare and expensive move, thought to have cost his campaign about £1.9 million, will even cause the baseball World Series final to be delayed by 15 minutes so NBC, CBS and Fox can air the spot simultaneously.
Mr Obama will highlight his “closing argument” in the infomercial, which underscores his campaign’s financial dominance over Republican rival John McCain with less than a week left in the race for the White House.
Mr McCain, who trails in national polls, mocked the move on the campaign trail, saying: “No-one will delay the World Series game with an infomercial when I’m president.”
ABC will be the only major US network not to run Mr Obama’s message at 8pm ET (midnight GMT), preventing a so-called “roadblock” on the broadcast networks.
Neither network officials nor Obama campaign aides would discuss the cost of the television time, but estimates by the Associated Press put it at about £1.9m. CNN suggested it could reach the £3.1m mark.
The estimates are less than the US TV networks would otherwise get for the 10 or 11 advert “units” they run during that half-hour, but Mr Obama will be charged the “lowest unit cost”, in compliance with federal law.
The Obama campaign, which rose in the polls due to Mr McCain’s mishandling of the economic crisis, is running the infomercial on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the start of the Great Depression.
Mr Obama is following in the steps of John F Kennedy, who presented a half-hour commercial that featured parts of his speech in Houston about his religion, and Richard M Nixon, who bought two hours of time on the eve of the 1968 election.
The last candidate to use the format was Ross Perot, in 1992, when he detailed his plan to cut the deficit before an audience of 16.5 million people.