Obama was scheduled to give his keynote address on the night of Tuesday, July 27. Some Obama advisors were concerned prior to his delivery, because it amounted to the first time he used a teleprompter. He would have three one-hour practice sessions in what were normally the FleetCenter locker rooms of the Boston Bruins and the Boston Celtics, reportedly having difficulty with the teleprompter while also learning various techniques in speaking to a live and TV audience. Once while Obama was backstage rehearsing his speech, he met Kerry staffer and speechwriter Jon Favreau (later to become Obama's speechwriter), who instructed him that to avoid overlap with Kerry, a sentence had to be changed. The sentence involved, later recalled as "We're not red states and blue states; we're all Americans, standing up together for the red, white, and blue" was to conclude his paragraph on red states and blue states, but was instead used by Kerry as "Maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us as one America: red, white, and blue"; it is unclear whether or not this already existed in Kerry's speech, but regardless, its removal left Obama incensed.
