ASPEN, Colo. - Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain said on Thursday the recent sharp fall in the price of oil had been helped by the end of the U.S. federal offshore drilling moratorium.

“I think several factors have contributed to the recent drop in the price of a barrel of oil. I think the practice of conservation and the reduction in our demand has probably been a major factor,” he told the Aspen Institute.

“I also don’t think it was entirely accidental that the day that the president announced lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling, the price of a barrel of oil dropped.”

Despite the decline in oil prices from record highs above $140 a barrel in July to around $115, gasoline prices remain a crucial issue in the election campaign, pinching Americans as they cope with falling house prices.

McCain’s call for offshore drilling to boost domestic oil supplies, which he says will provide a bridge to a time when new, greener, energy technology is in place, has been slammed by critics who say it would be a disaster for the environment and not make any difference to oil prices.

The Arizona senator rejects this view, and on Thursday he reiterated his position that it could help straight away.

“I met with a group of independent petroleum producers in Bakersfield, California. They said, using existing facilities, you could have an immediate impact on our supply of oil. With exploration of known areas … within a year or two, they could increase our oil supply,” McCain said.

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BIRMINGHAM. Mich. - Searching for a few dollars more, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain ran into his Hollywood idol on the campaign trial in Michigan.

“I had a great thrill last night. I saw Clint Eastwood, a real hero of mine,” McCain told customers at Kerby’s Koney Island, a local diner, on Thursday about a fund-raiser the evening before in Birmingham, Michigan.

McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said that Eastwood, 78 but still one of the most macho movie stars around, was staying at the same hotel as the Arizona senator and asked to see him.

The Oscar-winning actor/director and former Republican mayor of Carmel, California, supports McCain and has appeared at his events in the past.

Eastwood spent an hour in McCain’s suite, but Buchanan declined to say if he would be lending either his movie-making expertise or star-drawing power to the campaign.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.-Photo credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (Eastwood arrives at screening)

LIVONIA, Mich. - Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said on Wednesday that his wife, Cindy, had become the victim of an overenthusiastic
supporter.

“An individual shook her hand very vigorously at the last event we were at and she has a minor sprain,” McCain told a press conference during a day of fund-raising in this battleground state.

Cindy McCain was X-rayed at a local hospital and treated for the sprain.

Appearing beside her husband with her arm in a blue sling, she said she was absolutely fine.

“I shook hands with a very enthusiastic supporter and he got me the wrong way,” she said.

The wealthy heiress of a large Arizona beer distributorship, Cindy McCain has been described as a well-coifed presence beside her husband on the campaign trail.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Brent Smith (Cindy McCain introduces her husband in Indianapolis on Feb. 22, 2008)

TEANECK, N.J. - Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday over the Russian invasion of Georgia and said that the Democrat still wasn’t experienced enough for the White House.
“We’ve got a real clear choice to make. And I say it respectfully to Sen. Obama because he’s a gifted young man. But he’s not ready to be president on Jan. 20th of 2009,” Lieberman, of Connecticut, told a fund raising event for Republican hopeful John McCain.

“As the Russians move into Georgia as aggressors, and if you read the statements from the beginning, from Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama, one had a kind of moral neutrality to it that comes I think from inexperience.

“The other’s — Sen. McCain’s — was strong and clear and principled and put America where America always want to be, on the side of freedom,” he said while introducing McCain.

Lieberman sits in Congress as an Independent after he lost the Connecticut Democratic primary election in 2006 but won actual re-election running as a third party candidate.

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Lieberman applauds McCain)

YORK, Pa. - John McCain, teased as “that wrinkly, white-haired guy” by Paris Hilton, said on Tuesday he knew he wasn’t connecting with young voters but urged them to give him a hearing.

“I need to do a better job … with young voters in America and I want to reach out to them,” he told a former Sen. Hillary Clinton supporter now pondering whether to support him or his Democratic presidential opponent Barack Obama.

The questioner said during the town hall meeting in York, Pennsylvania he wasn’t sure what McCain stood for on issues like education that mattered to young voters.

“I would like to say ‘tell all your friends, come to the next townhall meeting.’ I’d like to meet and discuss with them … especially those who are undecided in this election,” McCain replied.

Bryce Wagoner, a 19-year still trying to make up his mind about who to vote for, said the Republican senator from Arizona
had not managed to ease his concern that social security would not be worth anything when he eventually retired.

“Everyone says that we need to fix it but nobody has a plan … he didn’t have any real solutions,” Wagoner said.

McCain later swung by Manheim Central High School to watch football practice and continue courting the youth vote.

After suggesting that they run over the press corps clustered in the center of the field, McCain told the squad — 15 times league champions since 1989 — that “you win as a team or you lose as a team,” before reminding them to study.

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Photo credit: Brian Snyder (McCain talks to veteran Steve Dunwoody at a campaign picnic in Maine)

ERIE, Pa. - Sen. John McCain said Monday the first thing he’d do if elected president is “call Tom Ridge to Washington from whatever vacation he’s taking and get him to work.”

Ridge, a former Homeland Security czar, is a potential vice presidential running mate, but if McCain was going to ask him to join the Republican ticket, he wouldn’t wait until after the election to do it.
 
Maybe it was a coded way of saying a McCain-Ridge White House bid isn’t in the cards, but that’s not likely to cool speculation the former Pennsylvania governor might be tapped as vice president.
 
McCain was speaking off the cuff, and his words about Ridge as they campaigned in this battleground state were unmistakably warm.
 
“So many of the Greatest Generation came from the heartland of America. … That is why I am honored to know a person like Gov. Tom Ridge, who had every opportunity after he graduated from Harvard not to go to Vietnam,” McCain told a town hall meeting of workers at a General Electric plant.
 
“He could have found a doctor who’d give him a certificate that he had a bad knee. Instead he went and decided to serve his country in the Vietnam war,” said McCain, who dined with Ridge and his wife, Michele, and daughter, Lesley, Sunday evening in an Erie waterfront restaurant.
 
With the Republican convention in the first week of September looming, McCain is running out of time to name his vice presidential pick.
 
Other potential McCain running mates include former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
 
Democratic rival Barack Obama is expected to announce his vice presidential running mate ahead of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention later this month.
 
His campaign has said it plans to announce the decision in e-mail and text messages to supporters.

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 Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Ridge, right,  with Sen. Joseph Lieberman, center,  at a campaign event for McCain, left, in December)

ERIE, Pa. - After a week of slamming his opponent in a barrage of controversially negative advertisements, U.S. presidential hopeful John McCain spoke for more than 20 minutes Monday without mentioning Barack Obama by name once. 
 
His audience seemed to like it.
 
“I want to hear more about the issues, not bickering between the candidates,” said Ron Holden, a locomotive assembly worker who listened to the Republican senator from Arizona address staff at a large GE Transportation plant here.
 
“I don’t want to hear about what Obama’s been doing from McCain and I don’t want to hear about McCain from Obama,” said Holden, a registered Democrat who said that he was undecided about which way he would vote in November.
 
McCain did aim one nuanced blow toward his Democratic rival, recalling Obama’s comment about bitter small town Americans clinging to their guns and their church.
 
Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, had taunted him over the remark, saying it was evidence he was out of touch with heartland America. McCain gently took a leaf out of her playbook.
 
“You’re going to seeing a lot of me in this state and we’re going to be on the bus and we’re going to go from town to town, and we’re going to tell people that we know that they love the Second Amendment and cherish their religion, because they believe in America,” McCain said.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain at a July 21 campaign appearance in Maine)

GRAHAM, N.C. - Offering Americans a summer tax holiday from soaring gasoline prices as another example of why she is the best candidate for president, Sen. Hillary Clinton took aim on Monday at her Democratic Party rival Sen. Barack Obama.

“This is one of the big differences in this race. My opponent Senator Obama opposes giving consumers a break on the gas tax at the federal level. I support it. I understand the American people need some relief,” she told supporters gathered in a fire station here.

“Meanwhile Sen. (John) McCain says he’s all for a gas tax holiday, but he won’t pay for it. Well, that is a mistake because we can’t give up on building and repairing our roads. My plan is 100 percent paid for with the windfall profits tax on Big Oil,” she said.

U.S. drivers are reeling from soaring costs at the pump that have seen gasoline reach $4 a gallon in some parts of the country, with an average price around the country of $3.60, after oil scaled a record near $120 a barrel.

Clinton’s plan would use the windfall profits on oil to subsidize the federal gas tax holiday over the summer to make sure the country’s Highway Trust Fund — used to build and repair roads and bridges — doesn’t suffer.

Major oil companies report first quarter earnings this week and are expected to chalk up bumper profits thanks to record crude prices, with Exxon Mobil forecast to see net income rise around 22 percent to over $11 billion.

“Last year, Exxon Mobile made $40 billion in profits. So you paid through the roof and they made out like bandits. I don’t think those profits were the result of a free and fair market,” she said, blaming energy market manipulation.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Frank Polich (Clinton campaigns in Indiana).

WILMINGTON, N.C. - Hillary Clinton, invoking the drama of a lusty street fight, repeated her challenge to Barack Obama for a debate free of moderators or a set agenda.

“We could even do it on the back of a flatbed truck. It doesn’t even need to be in some fancy studio somewhere,” she told a campaign rally on the banks of the Cape Fear River.

Her rival for the Democratic Party presidential nomination has deflected the request and said he would debate her after primary votes in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6.

“We need a president on day one ready to be our commander in chief, ready to turn our economy around. That is why I have to say I am very, very regretful that my opponent will not agree to a debate in North Carolina, because I think these issues are worth debating,” she said, goading her opponent for not being ‘tough’ enough.

“Tough questions in a debate is nothing like the tough decisions you’ve got to make in the White House…no moderators, just the 2 of us on a stage for 90 minutes.”

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- Photo credit: Reuters/John Gress (Hillary Clinton campaigns in Indianapolis).