Republican strategist Ralph Reed talks about what John McCain can do to get out the vote among social conservatives — starting with his pick of Sarah Palin as the vice presidential nominee. This video was shot by Inside the Tent contributor John Steward.

Inside the Tent has more than 40 delegates and other attendees in Denver and St. Paul, equipped with video cameras to capture the conventions from the ground up. Steward is not a Reuters employee and any opinions expressed are his own.

Click here for a full list of contributors at the Republican National Convention.

Click here for more Inside the Tent contributions.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 election coverage.

Former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul drew thousands of supporters to his “Rally for the Republic” event this week in Minneapolis,  across the river from the mainstream Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jennifer Riley from North Dakota, who attended the rally and the Republican convention, talks about the differences between the two gatherings, and the emerging struggle between the “classic conservatives” and “neo-conservatives.” This video was shot by Inside the Tent contributor Ginny Saville, who is a Ron Paul supporter.

Reuters Inside the Tent equipped more than 40 delegates and other attendees in St. Paul and the Democratic National Convention last week in Denver with video cameras to capture the conventions from the ground up. Saville is not an employee of Reuters, and any views expressed are her own.

Click here for a full list of contributors.

Click here for more Inside the Tent blogs.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 election coverage.

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.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

DES MOINES, Iowa - Republican presidential candidate John McCain conducted a whistle-stop tour through the Iowa State Fair on Friday but Freight Train was unimpressed.
 
The Arizona senator did what all politicians do at the fair. He pressed the flesh. He mounted a soapbox, actually a microphone placed behind bales of straw, and munched on some pork chops on a stick.
 
He may have won some votes when he praised the fair and its 1 million-plus visitors as true to the heartland of America. But he didn’t win over Freight Train.
 
The prize boar — all 1,259 pounds of him — stayed resolutely asleep throughout his visit, resting his enormous bulk on a bed of sand.
 
“I saw the new champion and world record-breaker boar, Freight Train. He’s in good health. I can tell you that,” McCain later said at a fund-raiser.
 
“I lament and had thought with some nostalgia about last year’s winner Big Red who is no longer with us. But perhaps I had part of him in a pepperoni pizza — who knows,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Ilya Naymushin (A wild boar stands in an open cage at a zoo in the Siberian city of Krasnoyark in 2006)

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)

STURGIS, S.D. - Republican presidential candidate John McCain attempted to harness a powerful engine of heartland conservatism on Monday — addressing a giant rally of motorcycle enthusiasts.

Hundreds of thousands of people converge on the remote town of Sturgis, South Dakota, each year for a week-long festival of rock music, wild, good times and American biker culture.

“I recognize that sound,” McCain said as dozens of bikers revved their engines as he walked on stage in a sustained growl of approval. “It’s the sound of freedom.”

The U.S. economy, energy and foreign policy are key issues in the contest between McCain and rival Barack Obama but the race could turn on competing visions of U.S. values.

With their love of the open road, many bikers see themselves as standard-bearers of American freedom.

An endless procession of bikers, many not wearing helmets, cruised the rural roads around Sturgis on Monday in a blur of chrome and leather.

The bikers form a natural audience for McCain. Many are war veterans who say they see McCain as an embodiment of patriotism and service because he spent years in a North Vietnamese prison during the Vietnam war.

Seven bikers carrying big U.S. flags escorted McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus into the Buffalo Chip fields where the festival was held.

But Kip Benbow, who rode his Harley three days from Indiana for the convention, said he supported McCain because he would defend another aspect of his way of life.

“I want the right to protect my house and my property. That’s my freedom and my right to arms. … I don’t want nobody messing with my guns,” said Benbow, who said he had as many as 40 guns at home.

McCain made his pitch to the bikers not on gun rights but on the issue he said was at the core of freedom: honoring the military.

“You are the heartland of America,” he told a crowd of thousands after a searing rendition of the U.S. national anthem played on electric guitar. “You are the heart and soul of America and I am honored to be in your company.

The bikers revved their engines in a deafening roar of approval.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Synder (McCain July 21 in South Portland Maine)

PANAMA CITY, Florida - Republican presidential candidate John McCain, whose musical tastes are known to include the disco band Abba, took in some country music on Friday — courtesy of Nashville star John Rich.
 
Rich, half of the star duo “Big and Rich,” staged a waterside concert for McCain in the Florida Panhandle, a traditional Republican part of the battleground state.
    
McCain’s rallies earlier this year included the tune, Johnny B. Goode, and once he got tired of that, Abba’s 1977 hit “Take a Chance on Me” was his song of choice. 
    
Music at his events are now an eclectic mix from the Rolling Stones to Tina Turner and Brooks and Dunn.
    
Rich, in between songs, declared himself a west Texas conservative who gets frustrated when he turns on the television because “I always see the other side” of the political spectrum represented.
    
So, he said, he wrote a song called “Raising McCain,” which he performed.
    
“We’re all just raising McCain,” he sang. “You can get on the train, or get out of the way, we’re all just raising McCain.”
 
At that point, McCain pulled up in his Straight Talk Express bus with his wife, Cindy, and Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist and his fiance.
    
Noting the military veterans in the crowd, McCain said: “We will not surrender, not in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world.” 
    
Rich’s musical partner, Big Kenny Alphin, was not at the Country First concert, and is reported to have given money to the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain speaks July 21 outside Maine Military Museum in South Portland)

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 - With Democrat Barack Obama trying to look presidential abroad and soon to face friendly crowds in the German capital, the Republican National Committee has decided to strike back by appealing to Berliners closer to home.
 
The party will air radio advertisements Thursday in Berlin, Pa., Berlin, Wis., and Berlin, N.H., bashing Obama’s voting record on defense issues, accusing him of choosing “Washington politics over the needs of our military.”
 
“Obama said that nobody wanted to play chicken with our troops on the ground,” an announcer intones. “But when it came time to act, he voted against critical resources: no to individual body armor, no to helicopters, no to ammunition, no to aircraft.”

The ad is a rehash of claims made in a television spot being aired by Obama’s rival Republican presidential candidate John McCain. FactCheck.org, in reviewing those claims, said the statements “are literally true but paint an incomplete picture.”
 
It is true Obama voted against a war-funding bill last year after President George W. Bush initially vetoed a version that contained a date for withdrawal from Iraq, the independent monitoring group said. Before that, Obama had cast at least 10 votes for war-funding bills, it said.

Obama’s campaign dismissed the ad as “distasteful and misleading.”
 
The RNC attacks are unlikely to dampen enthusiasm for Obama when he arrives Thursday in Berlin, Germany. A recent poll by the Bild newspaper found 72 percent of Germans would vote for Obama over McCain if they had a vote in U.S. elections.
 
Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Bush friend who expressed displeasure over electioneering ahead of Obama’s visit, professed herself an admirer, telling reporters she thought the Democratic presidential candidate was “well-equipped — physically, mentally and politically.” 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Johannes Eisele (Obama campaign balloon flies in front of Victory Column (Siegessaeule) in Berlin, where he will speak on Thursday)

 INDIANAPOLIS - Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Barack Obama remains the best bet to become the Democratic presidential nominee and would be a formidable opponent for Republican John McCain.
   

Speaking to the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, Gingrich said McCain had benefited from Obama’s recent difficulties, including controversial comments by the Illinois senator’s longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. 

“But Obama remains a formidable opponent. He is also the most probable Democrat nominee, even if he is not as untouchable as he was before,” said Gingrich, who led his party’s takeover of the House of Representatives in what was known as the Republican Revolution of 1994.

Gingrich was eventually forced out of that role and has gone on to become an author. Though he remains a conservative, Gingrich relishes sometimes taking positions that are seen as contrarian to members of his party.

But he likely was toeing a party line to come when he added: “Obama is not just any left-wing politician. … He is a far left-wing politician, but with a beautiful smile.”
Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage