DENVER - John Kerry, the failed 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, took the stage at this year’s party convention on Wednesday to praise Illinois Sen. Barack Obama – whose career he helped launch — and lambaste John McCain.

Kerry, who said he had been friends with McCain for nearly 22 years, used tough words to criticize the Arizona senator’s evolution from a maverick legislator to a presidential candidate.

“Before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself,” Kerry said, listing what he described as McCain’s shifts on tax cuts, immigration, and climate change.

“Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding?” Kerry said. “Talk about being for it before you’re against it!”

The last line was a send-up of a gaffe Kerry himself made about being in favor of funding for the Iraq war before he was against it.

Many felt the line, which Republicans used to mock him, helped cost the Massachusetts senator the election four years ago.

Kerry gave a big boost to Obama’s career by giving the then-state senator a prime-time speaking role at the ‘04 convention.

NEW YORK - Few would doubt that Barack Obama has attracted more media coverage than his Republican rival John McCain, fueling suspicion that journalists are biased towards Obama. 

A Rasmussen Reports survey in July found that 49 percent of voters believe most reporters are trying to help Obama. Just 14 percent believed most reporters were trying to help McCain and 24 percent said most reporters tried to be objective.

Obama’s seventh appearance this year on the cover of Time magazine, compared to two for McCain, renewed those charges this week. Read our story on that here.

Many journalists argue that Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, is simply a bigger story than McCain, who fits the traditional mold of a man running for president.

Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Report monitors news on the three major TV networks, said Obama’s overseas trip in July was “the culmination of the storyline about Obama getting all the media coverage.”

Up to that point, he said, Obama had a 2-to-1 advantage in airtime but there seemed to have been a “self-correcting mechanism” by the media in recent weeks, influenced also by the fact that Obama went on vacation, leaving the field to McCain.

From July 28 to Aug 15, Tyndall said total network coverage of McCain took up 45 minutes compared to 28 minutes for Obama.

“Obama coverage went way off after the hyper-charged cover of his trip and the last three weeks he’s been off the radar screen,” Tyndall said.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, said analysis of 48 TV, cable, radio, newspapers and Internet outlets showed 50 percent of general election stories were “significantly” about McCain (at least 25 percent about him) while 80 percent were significantly about Obama.

But a report at the end of July by the Center for Media and Public Affairs said that since the primaries ended, on-air evaluations of Obama have been 72 percent negative while McCain’s coverage was 57 percent negative.

Another report this week by the same institution tracked the number of jokes about the candidates told by late night chat show hosts Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman. Obama was the subject of 169 jokes to McCain’s 322. 

Obama was the subject of more jokes on Comedy Central, however — 207 to 201 — a trend the report linked to heavy news media coverage, which it said may have spurred greater attention from “fake news” shows on the channel.

It said the most frequent McCain jokes dealt with his age while Obama jokes tended to portray him as “pretentious or the beneficiary of fawning media coverage.”

A sample joke (from Leno): “The only way McCain could get less coverage is if he got a primetime show on NBC.”

PICTURES: REUTERS/ Jason Reed, Rebecca Cook

LYNCHBURG, Virginia - Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.

The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

Foreign policy has become a dividing line in the race for the White House.

Obama favors a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq over 16 months, while John McCain, his Republican rival for president, opposes a timeline and says U.S. forces must stay to finish and win the war.

McCain, an Arizona senator, sought to highlight his foreign policy credentials during the Russia-Georgia crisis last week, giving a series of harsh statements directed at Moscow soon after the conflict began.

Obama, who was on vacation in Hawaii, followed suit with statements that became sharper over time.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

SACRAMENTO - Nothing like starting your vacation with an international crisis.
 
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was Hawaii bound when it became clear he needed to make a public statement about the outbreak of violence between Georgia and Russia — as rival John McCain had already done — or risk looking out of touch.
 
Arrangements were hastily made for a quick press conference during a refueling stop in Sacramento.
 
American flags were found for a backdrop and Obama came into the small room to make his statement, still dressed in khakis, a black polo shirt and a light jacket.
 
“This is a volatile situation,” he said. “Obviously we’ll be getting updated on a regular basis. But what is clear is that Russia has invaded Georgia’s sovereignty … has encroached on Georgia’s sovereignty, and it is very important for us to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”
 
The Illinois senator still intends to duck out of the spotlight in the next week, but Friday was not the day to keep quiet.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama arriving in Paris July 25)

John McCain got his own taste of celebrity last week and evidently liked it — he’s back with a new ad ridiculing Barack Obama’s fame. 

The Republican candidate got a huge boost from accusing Obama of being a big celebrity like Paris Hilton and acting like some sort of political messiah.
 
Until his spate of negative attacks, McCain had been languishing ignored by the media while Obama triumphantly toured the world.
 
But last week McCain nearly tied Obama in the battle for media coverage — the first time that has happened since the start of the general election, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
 
So the Arizona senator is returning ahead of Obama’s weeklong vacation in Hawaii with another advertisement ridiculing his fame. It also paints him as a big-tax Democrat.
 
“Life in the spotlight must be grand,” an announcer says as a camera pans over images of a smiling Obama on the covers of GQ, Vanity Fair and other magazines.
 
“But for the rest of us, times are tough,” the announcer says. “Obama voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000. He promises more taxes. On small business. On seniors. Your life savings. Your family.”
 
“Painful taxes. Hard choices for your budget. Not ready to lead. That’s the real Obama.”
 
Scary stuff, but…
 
A study in mid-July by the Tax Policy Center — a venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution — found that Obama’s tax proposals would lift the after-tax income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans by 5.5 percent.
 
McCain’s plans would provide the poor with “virtually no benefit,” it said.
 
Nearly everyone else does better under Obama’s tax proposals as well.

Only the top 20 percent of U.S. wage earners would do better under McCain than Obama. The richest Americans would see after-tax income rise by 5.9 percent under McCain’s plans, while under Obama their after-tax income would drop by 2.8 percent, the study found.Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Top: Reuters/Bryan Snyder (McCain appears with former President George Bush in Maine July 21); Bottom: Reuters/Rebecca Cook (Obama at a speech in Michigan Aug. 4)

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama thinks John McCain is losing his credibility as a maverick.
 
Sure, the Arizona Republican has sometimes refused to go along with his party. Sure, he has occasionally cussed out Senate colleagues. And, yes, the word “maverick” is regularly attached to his name in the media.
 
But that was before McCain became the Republican presidential candidate. Now, Obama says, he has started changing his positions to please the party.
 
“That doesn’t exactly meet my definition of a maverick,” the Democratic presidential candidate told supporters in Indiana this week.
 
“You can’t be a maverick when politically it’s working for you and not a maverick when it doesn’t work for you,” Obama said.
 
The Illinois senator began taking jabs at McCain’s maverick image after suffering a week of taunts and insults from the Arizona senator’s campaign. McCain’s aides ridiculed Obama as a celebrity and accused of him injecting race into the campaign.
 
With some polls showing McCain gaining ground and the two candidates in a virtual tie, Obama is fighting back with his own negative attacks.
 
He has rolled out speeches and an ad challenging McCain’s maverick image, ridiculing a recent TV spot that touted the Arizona senator as “the original maverick.”
 

“Really?” Obama’s ad questions before cutting to a 5-year-old clip of McCain saying he had voted to back President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time.
 
“Maverick, or just more of the same?” the ad asks as the image on screen expands to show McCain posed in a photo with Bush.
 
The Democratic National Committee rolled out its own ad saying much the same thing: “Maverick No More.”
 
Ridicule or not, McCain is embracing the maverick moniker.
 
“You may have noticed that I have been called a maverick,” he told an Ohio crowd Thursday. “Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment. Sometimes it’s meant as a criticism, sometimes worse.
 
“But what it really means is that I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a president. I don’t work for a special interest and I don’t work for myself. I work for you and the country we love.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

 Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain greets a veteran in Maine July 21)

Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric on the campaign trail has given rival John McCain yet another epiphany.
 
Not only is Democratic presidential candidate the most popular celebrity in the world, not only has he injected race into the election, but he also must think he’s some sort of political messiah.
 
That’s the message the Arizona Republican put in a new video sent to his supporters.
 
“It shall be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed. They will call him The One,” the announcer intones in a voice of reverential authority.
 
The text of the one minute, 14 second video strings together phrases and pictures loaded with religious imagery and uses them to ridicule lines from Obama’s high-flying speeches.
 
“A light will shine down from somewhere. It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany and you will say to yourself, ‘I have to vote for Barack’,” Obama says.
 
In case you missed the point, McCain trots out Republican icon Charlton Heston in his role as Moses in the epic movie “The Ten Commandments.”
 
“Behold His mighty hand,” Heston shouts. And as the actor raises his staff to part the waters of the Red Sea, Obama’s presidential-style seal comes swirling through the waves while a chant of “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” swells in the background.
 
The video comes at the end of a week in which McCain has turned to negative attacks and ridicule in an effort to blunt Obama’s advantage in the polls for the Nov. 4 election. McCain’s campaign accused Obama of injecting race into the campaign and said he was attention-grabbing celebrity, more popular even than Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Obama has fought ridicule with seriousness.
 
“It’s downright sad that on a day when we learned that 51,000 Americans lost their jobs, a candidate for the presidency is spending all of his time and the powerful platform he has on these sorts of juvenile antics,” said spokesman Hari Sevugan.
 
“Barack Obama will continue talking about his plan to jump-start our economy by giving working families $1,000 of immediate relief.”
 
“We were having some fun with our supporters,” McCain told a news conference.
 
“I don’t think our campaign is negative in the slightest.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts (Obama on Capitol Hill July 29)

KANSAS CITY, Missouri - Republican presidential candidate John McCain is tangling with taxes again.
 
The Arizona senator found himself in hot water with conservatives after telling ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday that “nothing is off the table” in trying to protect the Social Security benefits system for seniors.
    
At a town hall meeting in Aurora, Colorado, McCain said: “I want to look you in the eye: I will not raise your taxes nor support a tax increase. I will not do it.”
 
He added, “I am opposed to raising taxes on Social Security. I want to fix the system without raising taxes.”
    
That statement earned the praise of the conservative Club for Growth organization in Washington, whose president, Pat Toomey, called it “exactly what the country needed to hear.”
    
McCain, at a fundraising event for his campaign, returned to the subject. “I am opposed to raising taxes. I am opposed to raising taxes,” he said.
    
“And any negotiation that I might have when I go in, my position will be that I’m opposed to raising taxes. But we have to work together to save Social Security.”
    
“This young man standing right in front — Social Security beneifts won’t be there for him when he retires. Is this right for us to lay off to the next generation of Americans a burden that we imposed on them? No. And it’s not America, it is not America,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Mike Blake (covers of McCain and Obama biographies at ComicCon covention in San Diego)

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama can’t seem to please the folks running John McCain’s campaign for the U.S. presidency.
 
They criticized the Democratic candidate for not visiting Iraq, but then he spent nine days abroad, visited both fronts in the U.S. war on terror, didn’t make any fatal mistakes and drew 200,000 people to a speech in Berlin.
 
Now the Republican’s campaign has a new beef against the Illinois senator — he’s way too popular, the most popular celebrity in the world, bigger even than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.
 
It’s a point McCain makes in a new TV advertisement.
 
“I would say that it’s beyond dispute that he has become the biggest celebrity in the world. It’s a statement of fact. It’s backed up by the reality of his tour around the world,” McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told reporters in a conference call.
 
“They have more fans around the world than Britney Spears does. I make that bold blank statement,” added McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.
 
But McCain traveled around the world and met leaders too, so isn’t he a global celebrity as well? What’s the difference?
 
“We see him more as a global leader than a global celebrity,” Davis said. “When people in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, want to talk to somebody who has a leadership and knowledge of positions around the world, they talk to John McCain. I contrast that with Barack Obama’s own trip to Europe. The focus on media, the focus on events and activities, is much more something you would expect from someone releasing a new movie than running for president.”
 
McCain’s crew sees devious motives behind the cultivation of popularity. Davis said it lets Obama “create a fan base around the world that allows him to get a lot of media attention and avoids him having to address the important issues of our time.”
 
But won’t people see the ad as negative campaigning?
 
Barack Obama started it, Davis said. He attacks McCain harshly every day on the campaign trail. Plus he was the first to turn to negative advertising, both in the primary and in the general election.
 
“I’m going to do everything in my power to protect my candidate,” Davis said.
 
“I’m going to let the American public decide what is negative or not negative.”

So what do you think, is it a fair ad or not?

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Crowds cheer Obama outside No. 10 Downing St. in London on July 26); Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain speaks at campaign evenint in Maine July 21)

WASHINGTON - With the clock ticking on his hunt for a running mate, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spent nearly three hours on Monday meeting with his vice presidential search team and campaign advisers.

Obama visited the downtown office of Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general who is leading the process of researching and analyzing potential vice presidential picks, and emerged with little to say.

Asked by reporters who he met with, Obama replied: “Some guys.” As he got into his car, he asked reporters how they were doing then told them: “Get back on the bus.”

A few minutes after Obama pulled away, the Politico newspaper reported that the other leader of the search process, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John Kennedy, and campaign manager David Plouffe and strategist David Axelrod left the building through a separate entrance.

The Washington Post reported Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has had “very serious” talks about joining the ticket, according to sources close to Kaine. Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh are also being seriously vetted for the job, the Post said.

Neither Obama nor Republican rival John McCain is expected to make a choice during the opening week of the Olympic Games in China, which start on Aug. 8, giving them less than two weeks to make their decisions known or wait until near the nominating conventions.

The Democratic convention opens on Aug. 25.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage  

- Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama speaks alongside his top economic advisors during a roundtable meeting at a hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 28)