An interesting tidbit from Ben Smith: The Obama campaign didn't originally plan on Brian Schweitzer delivering the barnburner he did.
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer said his show-stealing speech Tuesday night, which brought the crowd in Denver to its feet and made him the talk of the convention, was a last-minute improvisation that departed from the prepared remarks he'd agreed on with the Obama campaign. "We had a convention that went through the first day and didn't get anybody fired up," said Schweitzer, who spoke on the second evening after keynote speaker Mark Warner of Virginia.
"We didn't have anybody stand up, and we didn't have anybody get excited," he said.Schweitzer, other sources said, had already clashed with convention organizers over the editing of his speech. So when he took the stage, the Montana governor expanded dramatically on a prepared text sent by the campaign to reporters, adding signature language that stuck out from the rest of the speakers' words -- he was the only one talking about "petro-dictators" -- and offered a rhetorical merger of environmentalism and patriotism.
--Eve Fairbanks