“The president is free to nominate whomever he likes,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “But picking judges based on his or her perceived sympathy for certain groups or individuals undermines the faith Americans have in our judicial system.”

McConnell’s Republicans are turning to a conservative Southerner as their point man on Obama’s nominee, signaling that they won’t shy away from a protracted fight despite risks of being cast as obstructionist.

Sen. Jeff Sessions’ ascension as the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee comes more than 20 years after the panel rejected him for his own federal judgeship during the Reagan administration over concerns that he was hostile toward civil rights and was racially insensitive.

Coincidentally, Sessions, R-Ala., replaces Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a moderate who was one of just two Republicans in 1986 to oppose Sessions as a U.S. district court judge. Specter left the GOP last week to become a Democrat, creating the vacancy atop the committee just as Justice David Souter announced his retirement.

The choice of Sessions has excited conservatives who see him as a sharp lawyer with well-established legal views after a career as a prosecutor and Alabama attorney general.

“Any nominee must understand that the role of a justice is to be a neutral umpire of the law, calling the balls and strikes fairly while avoiding the temptation to make policy or legislate from the bench based on personal political views,” Sessions said in a statement Tuesday. “We must return to our original understanding that policy-making is reserved to the political branches and that courts serve the limited, but essential, role of disposing of cases and controversies based on a fair construction of the Constitution.”

Sheldon Goldman, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, agreed that Sessions has a firm grasp on the issues but said making Sessions “the face of the party” for the Supreme Court nomination might not play well symbolically.

Goldman, who has written a book on judicial nominations, said Specter’s defection resulted in part from the perception that the GOP has moved too far right.

“And instead of responding to that by placing a moderate as the ranking Republican, they go for a very conservative Southern Republican who represents everything that has driven Specter and other moderate Republicans out of the party,” Goldman said.

Sessions is among the most conservative senators, taking hard-line positions on issues such as immigration and affirmative action.

His nomination as a judge two decades ago ran into trouble when civil rights groups complained that he had pursued politically motivated voter-fraud charges against black leaders as a U.S. attorney in south Alabama. Others came forward to say he had made racially insensitive comments, including calling groups like the NAACP “un-American” and agreeing with someone else’s statement that a white civil rights lawyer was “a disgrace to his race.”

Sessions said the comments were taken out of context or fabricated. He and his supporters argued that Democrats were using the allegations to reject Sessions over honest ideological differences.

Sessions, from Mobile, later was elected Alabama’s attorney general in 1995 before winning his Senate seat in 1996.

“It’s a thrill as someone who spent 15 years full-time in federal courts to have this opportunity,” he said.

He said any nominee is entitled to a fair hearing but also should expect “probing questions,” and he did not rule out a Republican-led filibuster under the right circumstances.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he doesn’t expect a Republican filibuster. Democrats already have nearly enough votes to defeat that.

Reid paid tribute to Obama’s past experience as a law professor Tuesday and said he’s confident he’ll send a very qualified nominee to the Senate.

He said on NBC’s “Today” show he hopes Obama goes outside the existing legal system and finds a former governor or senator, or someone who has “real life experiences.”

Reid said that “I feel comfortable that his choice will be as good as his Cabinet choices.”

Sessions, who was confirmed for the new post Tuesday, is technically fourth in line in seniority on Judiciary, but the others are either restricted under committee term limits or would have to give up top positions on other panels to take the Judiciary spot.

Under an arrangement worked out to prevent a turf battle, Sessions is expected to keep the Judiciary post only through the end of next year. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa would then take the top GOP post at Judiciary, and Sessions could become lead Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.

He put finishing touches on his speech Thursday morning, but also found time to shoot some hoops on a basketball court at the Denver Athletic Club.

He also spoke to a luncheon for female Illinois delegates. “I had this speech tonight. I wanted to practice it out on you guys. See if it worked on a friendly audience,” Obama joked. He didn’t actually give the speech.

“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” he added. “It’s because of all of you that Michelle and I have this great honor of helping to lead the party and win back this White House.”

Aides said his address accepting the Democratic presidential nomination would be a “direct conversation” with Americans on what’s at stake and the risks of putting another Republican in the White House.

Obama, who first gained national prominence just four years ago in a speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention as a little-known Illinois state senator, was also expected to draw contrasts with rival John McCain and try to dispel any remaining concerns Americans might have about his capability to govern.

Republican McCain said in an interview that aired Thursday – but was taped on Wednesday – that he wasn’t ready to announce a running mate just yet, although he was expected to do so by week’s end, possibly Friday.

Obama accepts the Democratic nomination Thursday night at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High.

Three hours before the day’s program began, as many as 1,000 people were lined up at a pedestrian entrance to the stadium. On a hot, sunny day, security people were advising the crowd to drink a lot of water. Nearby street parking was going for as much as $80 a space.

“Senator Obama’s speech tonight will be as he himself has characterized it, more workmanlike, a very direct conversation with the American people about the choice we face in this election. About the risk of staying on the same path we’re on, the risk of just more of the same versus the change we need,” Obama spokeswoman Anita Dunn said in a conference call with reporters.

McCain appeared poised to name his running mate soon after the end of the Democratic convention, in hopes of curbing any bump in the polls that Obama might get as he and running mate Joe Biden and their wives begin a three-day bus tour of battleground states on Friday, beginning in Pennsylvania.

McCain, too, planned a rally in Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

He said in a radio interview that he was bringing to that event both former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, two of the leading names on his short list for vice president. But he cautioned against assuming that meant either one would be the pick.

“I haven’t decided yet, so I can’t tell you,” he told KDKA NewsRadio in Pittsburgh in an interview that was taped on Wednesday.

Another Republican mentioned often in vice presidential speculation, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, was in Denver as part of a GOP team criticizing Democrats. He deflected all questions about the possibility of being McCain’s vice presidential pick. As to his immediate plans, Pawlenty said, “I am scheduled to be in Minnesota tomorrow to be at the State Fair.”

McCain, in his Pittsburgh radio interview, praised Ridge, a longtime friend and frequent campaigning partner. “He’s a great American and a great and dear friend and I rely on him and I have for many years,” McCain said.

A Ridge candidacy could irk some conservative Republicans because of his stance in favor of abortion rights.

Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as an important battleground.

“This is not hyperbole: We cannot win without Pennsylvania,” Biden, who spent part of his youth in Scranton, Pa., told Pennsylvania delegates at a breakfast Thursday.

Obama hopes Biden’s blue-collar appeal will let him avoid a repeat of his Pennsylvania primary loss in the Democratic primary to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Obama stood ready to accept the Democrats’ nomination, the first black person to claim such a prize, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Democrats officially made Obama their presidential choice and Biden their vice presidential nominee on Wednesday.

The McCain campaign said it planned to air a new ad that will run in battleground states Thursday night around the time of Obama’s address. In it, McCain will look into the camera and speak as if he were talking directly to Obama, said McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker.

Obama played basketball Thursday morning at the Denver Athletic Club. He waved to supporters as he came out, wearing a Secret Service cap, a brown shirt and athletic pants.

He was also doing some final work on his speech, said campaign spokesman Dan Pfeiffer.

“Doing the speech at Mile High is an important point for our campaign. It’s symbolic of how Sen. Obama won the nomination. It will show how Obama wants to involve people who are not usually involved in the political process,” Pfeiffer told reporters.

Republicans, keeping up a theme they first used when Obama drew tens of thousands for an appearance in Berlin, derided the acceptance speech’s stage as befitting a celebrity with little actual accomplishment.

“This Roman-like facade, a facade with Roman columns, is a perfect metaphor or icon for the point that it’s an interesting production, but behind it there’s not much there,” Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty told ABC.

Democrats have responded by noting that President Bush’s acceptance speech in 2004 also took place on an elaborate stage that included similar columns.

The drama of Obama’s long, emotional primary struggle against Clinton behind him at last, the Illinois senator’s convention speech will propel him into a tough sprint to Election Day.

A modern-day technological effort was under way to get most of those packed into the stadium to form the world’s largest phone bank – text-messaging thousands more to boost voter registration for the fall.

Obama accepts his party’s nod on a day few might have imagined decades ago, when King fought for civil rights.

“This is a monumental moment in our nation’s history,” Martin Luther King III, the civil rights leader’s eldest son, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “And it becomes obviously an even greater moment in November if he’s elected.”

Obama was just 2 years old when King addressed a sea of people on the National Mall in Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

Adding a touch of celebrity to the convention’s final night, singers Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder and will.i.am were scheduled to perform, with Academy Award-winner Jennifer Hudson singing the national anthem.

Unite the Party: Hillary and her increasingly irrational supporters need to get a grip and move on. The election was hers to lose and she did so by not planning past Super Tuesday, giving Obama a string of caucus victories that propelled him to victory.

As a result of this monumental strategic blunder, Obama pulled ahead and Clinton fought back, turning this once warm and fuzzy primary into a political brawl. I know feelings were hurt and egos were bruised. There are also many women who are bitterly disappointed because they wanted to see a woman president.

The incessant whining of Clinton supporters, however, is beginning to work the last nerve of Democrats who actually want to win. Obama and Clinton’s policies were often so close as to be nearly indistinguishable. It is simply inconceivable that one could support Clinton and then opt for McCain – unless race plays a pivotal factor in the decision.

That’s right, I said race. How else could a Clinton-supporting woman now vote for John McCain, who will put Roe v. Wade in jeopardy? How could such a person who professes to care about women’s issues vote for McCain when it is obvious that a barrier breaking black man will do more to help a woman get elected as president in the future? It does not make sense unless there is an ulterior, underlying motive.

I think the party will unite because Hillary has even more to lose than Obama. If she (or Bill) is blamed for a loss, it will be career suicide. People who might be natural supporters of a forthcoming Clinton candidacy will shun her if she is perceived as the jealous villain who put McCain in the Oval Office.

Define Obama: On Monday, Michelle Obama was transformed from a Republican-created cartoon of an angry black woman who disliked America, into a working mother with strong family values. Barack must be as successful as his wife in marketing himself to the American people.

By the end of the convention, voters must feel like he is tough enough to keep them safe, feels their economic pain and has the judgment to overcome reservations about his experience. He must also connect with the burping fools slurping beers on wobbly barstools who want to be reassured that Obama is warm enough to share a cold one.

Fortunately, Obama is a gifted orator who could read graffiti on a bathroom wall and make it sound like the Gettysburg Address. He must flash every bit of his effulgent brilliance – or his candidacy may be a flash in the pan.
Caricature McCain: How can McCain keep our house in order when he can’t even count the ones he has?

This is the type of question that must be ruthlessly raised at the convention. McCain needs to be defined as an out of touch George Bush clone who is past his prime and surrendered his dignity to win the GOP nomination.

I can’t tell you how many people I have met who say they, “miss the John McCain” of 2000. The onus is on the Democrats to relentlessly drive home the point that this “maverick” no longer exists and has been replaced by a party hack that is the candidate of the past. McCain should be portrayed as a dangerous, hot tempered curmudgeon who barely understands the Internet, wants to reignite the cold war and is not forward thinking enough to get us out of Iraq, much less propel America towards future economic or military greatness. And, as a Bush enabler, he is as responsible as anyone for the miserable failures of the past eight years.

Finally, McCain is going to the well too often on his POW experience. Democrats should remind voters that the McCain of 2000 was humble about his heroism and did not use it incessantly as a campaign talking point.

Gay Issues: Democratic National Committee Treasurer, Andy Tobias, set the tone when he said at the podium, “As a gay man I yearn for a president who believes in equal rights for all Americans.” Ted Kennedy also included GLBT people – and Obama or Biden should follow his lead. This would mark a sharp contrast with the upcoming GOP convention, where a concerted effort will be made to bring home social conservatives at the expense of GLBT Americans. If the Democrats can shave off enough GLBT people on the fence, they might win Florida or other swing states.

The 2008 Democratic convention must defy convention by combining Obama’s signature brand of hope with hard knocks against McCain. If the Democrats let this strategic moment pass, our nation will be stuck in the past and doomed to repeat history.

The former first lady ceded the nomination that was almost hers in a prime-time speech to Democratic delegates, closing another chapter in a long, improbable political career that took her from supportive spouse to political powerhouse.

She was warmly embraced by delegates split between herself and Barack Obama in the primary. Any who were still angry over her loss were drowned out in applause when she opened her speech by declaring herself “a proud supporter of Barack Obama.”

She exhorted her backers – “my sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits,” she called them – to remember who was most important in this campaign.

“I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me?” she said. She urged them instead to remember Marines who have served their country, single mothers, families barely getting by on minimum wage and other struggling Americans.

“You haven’t worked so hard over the last 18 months, or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership,” Clinton told the delegates. “No way. No how. No McCain.”

The line drew applause from Obama, who was watching on television from Billings, Mont., with supporters and reporters.

Clinton spoke on the eve of the delegate roll call in which both she and Obama will be nominated for president. But under a deal between the two camps, only some delegates will get the opportunity to cast a historic vote for either a woman or a black man before the split decision will be cut off in favor of unanimous consent for Obama.

Advisers to Clinton and Obama sent a joint letter Tuesday night instructing state delegation chairs to distribute vote tally sheets to delegates Wednesday and return them by 4 p.m. local time, just as the vote is scheduled to get under way.

The letter said Clinton would have one nominating speech and two seconding speeches, followed by Obama’s nominating speech and three seconding speeches – totaling no more than 15 minutes for each candidate. Then the roll call will begin, said the letter signed by Obama senior adviser Jeff Berman, Clinton senior adviser Craig Smith and convention secretary Alice Germond.

Still, many details were unclear – which states would get a chance to vote, whether Clinton herself would cut it off in acclamation for Obama and if floor demonstrations would be tolerated.

The dealmaking and lack of direction left Clinton supporters frustrated. Clinton fueled confusion by refusing to publicly instruct her delegates how to vote, though she said she’ll back Obama when the time comes. She planned to meet with her delegates Wednesday.

All the Clintons, a longtime royal family of Democratic politics, were on hand to pass the torch to Obama. Clinton was introduced by her daughter Chelsea, while her husband watched from a box seat above the Arkansas delegation. Not everyone with a ticket could get in to hear Clinton after fire marshals declared the hall filled to capacity.

The convention hall was brimming with delegates wearing Clinton gear. There were Hillary T-shirts, buttons and stickers. Some delegates brought signs promoting Clinton for president. Many wore white shirts to mark the 88th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

“My mother was born before women could vote,” Clinton reminded them. “But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for president.”

The Obama campaign gave Clinton her due. Before she took the stage Tuesday night, Obama’s campaign distributed “Hillary” signs throughout the Pepsi Center. But only sentences into Clinton’s speech, those signs were quickly swapped out for others proclaiming either “Obama” or “Hillary” on one side, and “Unity” on the other.

Some Clinton delegates weren’t ready for so quick a pivot.

“We love you Hillary!” some shouted.

Jennie Lou Leeder, a Clinton delegate from Llado, Texas, said Clinton “was so good tonight, I was crying.”

Did her speech help to unify the party?

“It’s not Hillary’s job to bring this party together,” Leeder said. “It’s Barack Obama’s job to bring this party together.”

Daniel Kagan, a Clinton delegate from Englewood, Colo., said he felt pride and sadness watching Clinton speak. He was proud of her accomplishments, but saddened by the realization that her campaign was truly over.

Nevertheless, Kagan said, the speech will help to unify the party.

“I know that it’s changed attitudes,” Kagan said. “I saw some of my colleagues standing up and applauding for Obama for the first time.”

It was the culmination of an emotional day for Clinton loyalists, still wondering how the final act would play out in Wednesday’s roll call vote and whether they would have a chance to give their candidate one last show of support.

Party leaders said they feared a nationally televised floor demonstration Wednesday that would underscore party divisions.

“It seems to be a little more of a problem than I anticipated,” former Democratic Party chairman Don Fowler told the AP. “All you need is 200 people in that crowd to boo and stuff like that and it will be replayed 900 times. And that’s not what you want out of this.”

Standing before thousands of delegates, almost half of them her backers, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declared it time “to unite as a single party with a single purpose” and urged her followers to help elect once-bitter rival Barack Obama. “We are on the same team,” she said, after allowing the applause to build to a crescendo and linger, longer than usual – much like the Democratic primary race itself.

“Barack Obama is my candidate,” she said. “And he must be our president.”

But did she mean it? And would it matter?

True, her challenges Tuesday night were impossibly high, perhaps mutually exclusive.

She had to both promote her political future and unify her party. Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

- Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One…or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

- March 2008: “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”

- Feb. 23, 2008: “Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified.’ The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”

There in no such thing as a perfect world, though the Clinton and Obama image teams tried their best to create one. Hundreds of “Hillary” signs danced before the TV cameras, bearing her breezy blue signature. Her misty-eyed husband, former President Clinton, watched from above.

By the time she was done, Sen. Clinton had delivered a strong, convincing affirmation of Obama and, just as importantly, a thumping of McCain. She did her part. Her husband takes the stage Wednesday and then Obama must make his case to the American people that he will be ready on Day One.

That there’s more to him than a single speech.

That he’s the perfect man for troubled times. She brought the party together, for one night anyway, and now it’s up to Obama to close the deal with voters.

Unlike Obama, she no longer needs to worry about her favorability ratings so there was no pulling punches.

“No way,” Clinton said. “No how. No McCain.”

She said McCain would be an extension of the Bush administration. No jobs. Poor health care coverage. High gas prices. Home foreclosures. “More war,” she said, “Less diplomacy. More of a government where the privileged comes first, and everyone else come last.”

In other words, Clinton seemed to say, even if Obama is everything she said during the campaign, he’s still a better candidate than McCain. The speech was as much of an attack on McCain as it was an embrace of Obama. “We don’t need four more years of the last eight years,” she said.

The crowd, Obama and Clinton delegates alike, loved it.

She took the high road Tuesday night because it was also her best road politically; if Obama wins, she still emerges as a central voice in American liberalism, replacing the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy. And if Obama loses, as Hillary said he would during the campaign, she is blameless and the party can turn back to her without guilt in four years.

Behind the scenes Tuesday, the Obama and Clinton camps struck a tentative deal that would allow some states to cast votes in a roll call before somebody – possibly Clinton herself – cuts short the tally and asks the convention to nominate Obama by unanimous consent. This was her price for ending her historic bid for the presidency in a manner that, however messy, still left Obama in a stronger position than Kennedy left Jimmy Carter in 1980, when the Massachusetts senator extracted platform concessions and shrank from the traditional unity show at the final gavel.

But she did extract her price.

The bill came due Tuesday. The crowd. The applause. The promise of a vote Wednesday, and a speech laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun “I.”

“You never gave up,” Clinton told her delegates, a phrase that so perfectly fits her. “You never gave up. And together we made history.”

The head of a large African-American denomination challenged the party on abortion. An Orthodox Jewish rabbi raised his voice about school choice. A thirty-something evangelical Christian author warned against Democrats who mock believers.

Although well aware that party officials have political reasons for reaching out to them, several faith figures taking part in convention events say they want to go beyond talk about how faith and values inform longstanding Democratic policies. They are also calling for change on core Democratic issues, which could create tension.

“It’s important that people of faith are being listened to just like other constituencies, that we’re not marginalized,” said Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which has pressed the party to support policies aimed at reducing abortion rates. “Just because we’re participating in the process and engaging people who may not agree with us doesn’t mean we’re just a mascot.”

Religion has played a visible role at the convention, starting with an interfaith service and continuing Tuesday with the party’s first caucus meetings for people of faith.

Beneath “Pro-Family Pro-Obama” placards, a range of faith leaders – and Joshua DuBois, Barack Obama’s religious affairs director – framed poverty, climate change, human rights and abortion as not just policy causes but moral ones.

“Let’s be honest: Religion has been used and abused by politics,” said Jim Wallis, an evangelical and editor of Sojourners magazine. People of faith, he said, “should speak prophetically more than in a partisan way.” Wallis is not endorsing a candidate and will also appear on a panel in St. Paul, Minn., next week during the Republican convention.

Wallis said religious voices lobbying Democrats have gotten results, including language in the platform that aspires to reduce poverty rates by half in the next decade. Religious groups also had a hand in crafting platform language that pledges to support women who decide against having abortions; that was possible in part because the platform also strengthened wording supporting “a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion.”

One tenet of the Obama campaign’s religious outreach is connecting to religious communities beyond the usual liberal-leaning constituencies that support Democrats – and that’s where some of the challenges have come from.

Donald Miller, a 37-year-old author from Portland, Ore., is little known to most voters but revered among many young evangelicals for his best-selling spiritual memoir “Blue Like Jazz.”

Miller was a loyal Republican but said he left the party, in large part, because he thought Republicans pandered to evangelicals on abortion and gay marriage to win votes without accomplishing much.

Democrats are “reaching out to us, and I’m not naive as to why – they want our votes,” said Miller, who gave a two-minute prayer to close Monday’s convention session. “But they won’t get them and keep them unless they continue the momentum of adopting policies that promote the sanctity of life.”

Miller cited progress along those lines – including on abortion. His other priorities – poverty, global warming – also reflect a widening evangelical agenda that might benefit Democrats, if not in large numbers in November then in future elections. Miller also said he’d leave the party if some Democrats keep mocking people of faith.

“I’d like to see Obama address that – say that voice is no longer welcome,” he said.

Others invited to take part in the convention – including Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – make clear their participation isn’t an endorsement.

Even so, it’s significant Weinreb was invited to deliver a keynote address at the interfaith service. He sides with Republicans – and apart from most Jewish leaders – in support of government assistance, such as tax credits, for parents who want to put their children in private schools.

Weinreb did not pass up an opportunity to speak at the service “for freedom of choice in education” – and he later credited Democratic officials for putting no restrictions on what speakers could say.

That freedom also was evident when Bishop Charles Blake, head of the 6 million-member Church of God in Christ, spoke of “disregard for the lives of the unborn.” Blake, who called himself a pro-life Democrat, challenged Obama to adopt policies to reduce abortions and chided Republicans for not caring about “those who have been born.”

“Are we being used?” Weinreb said of faith leaders at the convention. “I certainly didn’t feel used. Obviously, politics is politics. I don’t want to be naive. I also don’t want to be cynical.”

Critics of the Democrats are skeptical. Tom Minnery, a senior vice president with the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, said Democratic voting records don’t back up the religious rhetoric.

“The party wants the voters,” said Minnery, who attended Tuesday’s faith caucus. “But not the values.”

But Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, after speaking at a luncheon hosted by the nonpartisan Faith and Politics Institute, insisted that the party’s outreach to faith communities is sincere, and that voices will be heard.

“The majority of our party people, they are people of faith,” he said. “When we get elected, we don’t check our faith at the door. We may not wear it on our sleeve.”

But Cameron Strang, the 32-year-old editor of edgy and hip Relevant Magazine, had second thoughts and pulled out of delivering the benediction on the convention’s first night, Monday. Citing fears that his bridge-building gesture would be wrongly construed as an endorsement, Strang said he instead hopes to take a lower-profile role, participating in a convention caucus meeting on religion later in the week.

“Through Relevant, I reach a demographic that has strong faith, morals and passion, but disagreements politically,” Strang wrote on his blog. “It wouldn’t be wise for me to be seen as picking a political side when I’ve consistently said both sides are right in some areas and wrong in some areas.”

Little known to outsiders, the Strang name carries weight with evangelicals, especially in the fast-growing charismatic and Pentecostal branches. Cameron’s father, Steven, who like his son is based in the Orlando, Fla., area, founded a magazine, Charisma, that spawned a publishing empire. The elder Strang has endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has aggressively courted the young evangelical vote, and the younger Strang has been part of it. He was on the guest list when religious leaders met with Obama in June in Chicago, consulted the campaign on Christian issues and interviewed Obama for his magazine, which claims a print circulation of 80,000 and 450,000 unique Web site visitors per month.

Yet Strang’s reticence to play such a high-profile role shows such relationships are a work in progress: While Democratic leaders are reaching out to more diverse religious groups, many younger evangelicals are striving for political independence and common ground without compromising on core issues like abortion.

The convention’s schedule is studded with faith-themed events, including the first interfaith gathering to open a Democratic convention. Those delivering invocations and benedictions during the four-night convention include a Greek Orthodox archbishop, a Catholic nun, a rabbi from Judaism’s Reform tradition and Joel Hunter, a Republican and Florida megachurch pastor who has made the environment a signature issue.

In his blog post, Strang wrote that he initially accepted the benediction invitation, in part, so he could pray in a forum where faith isn’t typically emphasized. He also wanted to provide tangible evidence that “this generation of values voters doesn’t necessarily need to draw political battle lines the way previous generations have, and that we can work through areas of disagreement toward common goals.”

Those goals range from fighting poverty, torture and genocide to protecting the environment and reducing the number of abortions, he wrote. Strang calls himself a pro-life Republican.

Learning later that he was to speak on the main stage on opening night gave him “serious pause.” Strang said Obama representatives understood his decision, and he wants to keep his good relationship with them.

Asked whether he got any pressure to reduce his role, Strang said Thursday he got a few e-mails, but it was a personal decision.

Obama campaign and convention committee officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Democratic officials have emphasized their faith outreach work is meant to recognize the nation’s religious diversity and unite the religious and nonreligious around shared values.

Strang found a different young evangelical to take his place delivering the closing prayer on Monday night: Donald Miller, author of the popular spiritual memoir “Blue Like Jazz.”

Strang’s soul-searching prompted one other change: He switched his political affiliation to independent this week.

As for his presidential preference, Strang said he still hasn’t decided.