Craig Crawford and CQ’s Trail Mix blog offers us the image of thousands of reporters in Denver covering a scripted event, waiting to pounce on anything which goes differently than planned.

With more than enough to fuel the storyline about a rift between Barack Obama and the Clintons on the convention’s opening day, the media frenzy is on.

Polls showing restlessness among Clinton voters. Behind-the-scenes reports of arguments about the theme of Bill Clinton’s speech later this week. A Wisconsin Clinton delegate endorsing John McCain in a television advertisement. And more.

How did this happen? Many factors are in play. But central to the apparent breakdown was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to publicly and forcefully dispel the notion that she was snubbed by Obama’s failure to vet her as a running mate.

Clinton left it to the Obama camp to spin the angle that she was not vetted because she did not want to produce documents without a guarantee of serious consideration. If that’s true, you can well imagine that, without such assurances, she was not going to produce just about the only thing left that the world doesn’t know about the Clintons – the  potentially controversial lists of donors to her husband’s presidential library.

I want a riot, a riot of my own.