Why do campaigns release “excerpts” of convention speeches before they’re actually given? My wife asked this last week, as we were sitting down to watch Obama’s address and all the pundits were telling us what he was about to say. I can understand the motive of getting an embargoed text into the hands of wire reporters who need to file their articles two minutes after the teleprompters shut off. But the key word is embargoed–i.e., given to them with the implicit expectation that they won’t report on the speech until it has actually been delivered. Talking heads who gab about the content of a soon-to-be-delivered speech seem to deflate the speech itself. That may be no concern of theirs, but it ought to be a concern for the campaigns. If I were a campaign manager, I would want to keep a lid on this content.