The Barackapolis in Denver was the toned down version:

At Invesco Field in Denver, the production staff of the Democratic National Committee proposed erecting enormous white columns on either side of the podium with all sorts of lights and adornments. To Axelrod, the whole setup looked like an over-the-top version of ancient Greece—or, more likely, a scene set from the movie “Star Wars”—and he asked for something more modest and sober, simple but presidential. The designers came back with some white columns that vaguely resembled the arcade between the West Wing and the White House, still a little presumptuous, perhaps, but better than trying to re-create Mount Olympus.

And this excerpt – Joe Biden could be the best part of the next four years:

Obama’s plane was taking off from Denver airport around 9 a.m. when Axelrod got confirmation that McCain had indeed picked Palin as his running mate. He went to the front cabin to tell Obama and his new running mate, Joe Biden. Biden asked, “Who’s Palin?”

And on how Palin was picked:

But McCain didn’t want the safe choice. A top adviser would later recall that telling McCain that Pawlenty was “safe” was “like guaranteeing” that McCain would not pick him. Prodded by Schmidt and Rick Davis, McCain began asking about Palin, a first-term governor who had shaken up the Alaska political establishment by taking on her own party elders, who was fearless and defiant, who was … a little bit like McCain. He had called her that Sunday morning while she was attending the Alaska State Fair. It was a quick phone call, only about five minutes, and Palin had trouble hearing McCain over the noisy crowd. But McCain was intrigued. He told Salter and Schmidt to fly her down to Arizona and take a close look.
Schmidt and Salter met with her as soon as she arrived in Flagstaff on Wednesday. The three talked late into the night. Schmidt and Salter probed and pressed and looked for gaps between her views and McCain’s. Palin shrugged off substantive differences. “What’s the big darn deal?” she asked, smiling and, in her frontier-girl way, half defying, half flirting with her interrogators. With her flat accent and folksy charm, Palin was refreshingly down to earth, thought Salter. Salter had been wary; he had favored Pawlenty, who exuded a warm Midwestern solidity. Schmidt was pro-Palin from the beginning. He saw her potential as a conservative populist, the kind of throw-’em-red-meat, bash-the-elites politician who thrilled the Republican base that Karl Rove had so carefully nurtured through the Bush years. By picking Palin, Schmidt argued, McCain could snatch the “change” mantle away from Obama. Not for the first time, Salter came around to Schmidt’s way of thinking. In the home of one of Cindy McCain’s business associates, the two men tried to impress on Palin just how grueling the coming months could be. She did not seem intimidated—in the least. She was up front about her family, telling the McCain aides that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter Bristol was pregnant.