Last night the Republicans made history, and not just by nominating the first woman to be part of their presidential ticket. They made history by being the first party at either of the 2008 conventions -- and, if my memory serves, the first party at any presidential convention ever -- to get across its prime-time message totally unfiltered on commercial broadcast TV.
This happened, in part, because ABC, CBS and NBC have limited themselves to one hour of prime time nightly at these conventions. But even so, all previous nights have allowed room for the networks to skip one speech while replaying parts of another, give room for its anchors and commentators to comment, and settle in for the night's one big speech.
Not Wednesday night. Wednesday night, Republicans filled the entire hour, and then some.
CBS, NBC and ABC joined the cable and PBS coverage at 10 p.m. ET, and said hello to viewers, setting up the speakers to follow: Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin. And that was it. At 10:01, Giuliani began speaking, with a New York skyline image, notably bereft of the World Trade Center towers, towering behind him.
As soon as Giuliani was through, he introduced Palin. The biographical video that had been scheduled was scrapped, in an undeniably canny move that allowed the Alaskan governor to, in essence, introduce herself to the American TV public.
Palin spoke until 11:08, at which time she was joined on stage by John McCain, who made his first appearance at the convention. At 11:15, local stations took over with local news at most stations, and that was it.
Both speeches were presented whole.
And both were accompanied by memorable visuals, including one of Palin's daughters cradling Palin's youngest child, and licking her palm 
to smooth his hair. The images, like the speeches and the evening, went by mostly unremarked -- except on cable, where there was room to speak afterward.
On commercial broadcast TV, all those anchors and correspondents, all that money and expertise, and they got to say nothing except a few minutes of observations at the end.
At CBS, Jeff Greenfield said Palin's speech had "perfect populist pitch." At ABC, George Stephanopolous said that McCain "broke free of George Bush tonight." Chris Wallace, on Fox News, called Palin's address "a heck of a speech," And on PBS, Jim Lehrer observed of Palin, "To say that she was well-received in the hall would be an understatement."
A lot of Palin's speech, as with Giuliani's, focused not only on attacks on Barack Obama, but on the media, and its treatment in covering and uncovering the various stories about the national neophyte Sarah Palin. Thrust upon the national stage, she is the first governor nominated for vice president since Spiro Agnew in 1968.
Agnew, of course, was the first vice president to make a name for himself by attacking the media, which he dismissed as "nattering nabobs of negativism." As another Republican said more recently: Here we go again...