Now that Al Gore has chosen Joseph Lieberman as his running mate we can ask the question: who made a bigger immediate splash, Lieberman or GOP VP choice Dick Cheney?
Cheney's selection was announced on July 25, while Lieberman went public on August 7. We've checked Lycos user queries for both days, and compared Cheney's July 25 results with Lieberman's August 7 queries.
While these numbers aren't perfectly scientific, they do offer a good peek into how each struck the public fancy. The results:
LIEBERMAN BEATS CHENEY: Lieberman on August 7 got more searches than Cheney on July 25, by a 5-3 ratio.
LYNNE BEATS HADASSAH: In the Battle of the Brides, Lynne Cheney beat Hadassah Lieberman by a 7-4 ratio. (Mrs. Cheney got 11% as many searches as her husband, while Mrs. Lieberman got only 4% as many searches as hers.)
GORE GETS MORE BOUNCE: The day of the Lieberman announcement, queries for Al Gore were twice Gore's daily average for the previous week. The day of the Cheney announcement, queries for George W. Bush were up only 50%.
THE BRITNEY FACTOR: How close were they to the top overall query-getters? Joseph Lieberman got about 45% as many queries as #1 Britney Spears on August 7. Dick Cheney got about 25% as many as Ms. Spears on July 25.
COMPARISONS: On July 25, Cheney got about the same number of searches as auto insurance, love poems, marijuana and Jennifer Lopez. On August 7, Lieberman got about the same number of searches as bikinis, Delta Airlines, and just slightly less than Anna Kournikova.
MARY CHENEY: On the day of his announcement Dick Cheney got 80 times as many searches as his daughter, Mary Cheney, a lesbian who is suddenly a national talking point. She's gaining fast on her dad: on August 7 Dick Cheney led Mary Cheney by only a 3-1 margin.
CO-QUERIES: On August 7, roughly 2% of all Lieberman queries mentioned abortion; 1% mentioned his voting record; 0.5% (one-half of one percent) mentioned Israel. On the Cheney side, on July 25 roughly 2% of searchers asked for his biography, and 1% mentioned his medical history.
THE FORMALITY FACTOR: Lieberman searchers called him "Joseph" rather than "Joe" by a 3-1 ratio. Cheney searchers called him "Dick" rather than "Richard" by a 6-1 ratio.
