St. Louis riveted; Phoenix, not so much

Missouri has not been widely viewed as a top-tier battleground state in the presidential race -- it’s competitive, as usual, but it will surprise most pundits if it does not ultimately land in John McCain’s column.

Recent polls have shown some tightening, though, so perhaps that’s a reason that preliminary Nielsen Co. ratings for the nation’s top metropolitan areas found the St. Louis market with the largest TV audience for Friday night’s debate.

Nielsen reported that a majority of households with televisions in and around the city -- 52.1% -- were tuned to the McCain-Barack Obama faceoff.

The “share” figure was even more impressive -- among all TVs in use as the debate aired, 82% in the St. Louis area had it on. That was far and away the highest such number in the major markets. St. Louis will host the vice presidential debate Thursday.

The area where the debate attracted the smallest audience? McCain’s backyard.

The household rating for the Phoenix-Prescott market was 24.8% (with a 47% share), according to the preliminary report.

Next to last: Los Angeles.

In both of these latter cases, viewership no doubt was lower than in many other places because the debate started at 6 p.m. local time.

Overall, in 55 of the nation’s top 56 markets (Houston was excluded because of disarray caused by Hurricane Ike), the debate’s rating was 33.2% -- impressive for a Friday night.

Nielsen promises its complete numbers Monday.

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Meanwhile, back in Alaska

Sarah Palin may be the darling of the United Nations, but back home in Alaska, the bloom on the state rose is fading a bit.

Poll numbers released last week show the Alaska governor’s approval rating has taken its biggest hit since her election in 2006. “The honeymoon is coming to an end,” Ivan Moore Research of Anchorage said in its report.

True, Palin’s approval rating of 68% surely must cause envy among President Bush and members of Congress. But the new figure for Palin is down from a high of 82% in January, which she replicated in the days after her surprise selection Aug. 29 as John McCain’s running mate.

Also, her disapproval rating in the survey of 500 likely voters conducted Sept. 20-22 was 27% -- double what it was at the beginning of the month. The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 4.4%.

Predictably, the biggest erosion in good feelings about Palin occurred among Alaska Democrats. But there also was a measurable slip in her standing among independent or third-party voters.

Chalk it up to the bruising effects of a national campaign and all the harsh scrutiny that brings? Probably. And, Moore notes, lots of governors would be pretty happy with Palin’s 68% approval mark.

That’s “still pretty positive,” he says. “But I suspect we’ve only caught the slump kind of halfway through here.”

In other words, there may be more bad news awaiting Palin when she gets back home -- whenever that happens.

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Biden’s history lesson a little off

During his first several weeks as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, the famously gaffe-prone Sen. Joe Biden did a surprisingly good job of keeping his foot out of his mouth. Sure, he slipped occasionally -- like the time he asked a crowd to welcome his running mate “Barack America” to the stage, or the time he said, “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America.” But they’re not the sort of bungles that start wars.

Now, however, the honeymoon appears over. Biden has blundered badly several times in recent weeks, often on issues relating to the economy. Worse, he’s been caught contradicting his running mate, a major political no-no.

When NBC’s Meredith Vieira asked him two weeks ago whether the federal government should bail out ailing insurance corporation AIG, Biden said no -- the same position his old colleague John McCain took.

That would have been fine, except that Obama had already endorsed the bailout, saying that he would not “second-guess” the government’s attempt to save AIG.

A few days later, Biden acknowledged on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the wealthy would pay higher taxes if Obama were elected president and that doing so would be “patriotic.”

He repeated the remark again on the campaign trail, and soon after, the Republicans were out with a TV spot deriding Biden and Obama for being tax-and-spend Democrats.

And last week, in an interview with “CBS Evening News,” Biden got his facts tangled when he told anchor Katie Couric that today’s leaders should take a lesson from the history books and follow President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a previous national financial crisis.

Declared Biden: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ ”

What happened was this: Republican Herbert Hoover was president when the stock market crashed in October 1929; Roosevelt didn’t take office until four years later.

And there were no televisions in use at the time -- radio was Roosevelt’s favored medium for addressing the nation.

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Mrs. Edwards speaks out

Elizabeth Edwards says she is still confronting the reality of last month’s disclosure of her husband’s affair with a campaign worker two years ago.

“It’s not a process that you get through,” Edwards says during a touching exclusive interview with Patricia Anstett of the Detroit Free Press.

“Certainly in the time frame we’re talking about. It’s an ongoing process of finding your feet again, retelling your story to yourself. You thought you were living in one novel, and it turns out you were living in another.”

Edwards, who revealed during her husband’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination last winter that her cancer had returned, says trust is “the most difficult hurdle” to overcome.

But the 59-year-old mother, faced with ongoing cancer treatments and a grave prognosis, says she’s tried to focus entirely on “the best thing for my children.”

And in her mind that means to lie low and allow public interest in the scandal to subside.

“My concern at the present time,” she added in her 45-minute telephone interview with Anstett, “is that these children can live with their father being an advocate for poverty, not for this current picture of him to be the one they carry with them, as young people and as adults.”

The couple have three children -- Cate, 26; Emma Claire, 10; and Jack, 8. A fourth child, Wade, was killed in an auto accident at 16.

Edwards is resuming her breast cancer awareness advocacy next month with a speech in the Detroit area and will later testify before Congress. She acknowledges that, like many women, she postponed mammograms for eight years, despite a suspicious spot, citing her busy life as the excuse.

Asked if she had forgiven her husband for his affair with Rielle Hunter, Edwards replied, “I don’t want to feed the monster, if you don’t mind.”

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Excerpted from The Times’ political blog Top of the Ticket, at www. latimes.com/ topoftheticket.

Times staff writers Kim Murphy and Kate Linthicum contributed.