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National Journal looks ahead at what to expect at the conventions.

The GOP 2004 platform grew to 92 pages as the party combined praise of the president with the views of many advocacy groups. This year, the Republican Party must blend core activists' wish lists with the priorities of presumptive nominee John McCain, who has earned the distrust of many social conservatives by supporting a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, pushing through campaign finance restrictions, advocating federal action to address carbon dioxide emissions, and endorsing research that uses embryos' stem cells.

Platform language "may be a weak tool" for influencing White House policy, but its value is demonstrated by the strenuous lobbying to shape it, said Connie Mackey, the senior vice president at the Family Research Council's legislative arm, FRCAction. She'll be attending the event with four other FRC staffers.

The initial draft of the Republican platform is being written behind closed doors by staff chosen by the Republican National Committee; Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the chairman of the Platform Committee; and Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the panel's co-chairman. The senior staffer is Steven Duffield, who spent five years working for Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona.

Party officials declined to say what is in the draft, but some clues are provided by the Platform Committee's website, gopplatform2008.com, which solicits comments about education, energy and gasoline prices, health care, jobs and economic growth, judicial nominations, national security, and protecting American values.

The 112 members of the Platform Committee are scheduled to meet in the Minneapolis Convention Center during the week of August 25, the week before the Republican convention across the river in St. Paul. Each state's convention delegation will send one man and one woman to the panel, and they will be assigned to subcommittees, McCarthy said. Committee members will then work with staffers picked by McCarthy and Burr to mark up their portion of the draft before forwarding it to the full committee for approval.

"It is expected that [Platform Committee members] would all be McCain supporters," said a convention official. But, according to Jessica Echard, who will focus on the platform's handling of sex and immigration issues for Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, "many of our grassroots advocates are very involved in the state parties. And if they end up being part of the Platform Committee, that's great for us."

In 2004, fewer than 100 advocates attended the GOP platform meetings, said Echard, whose contingent will include four or five people. Schlafly will attend, just as she has every Republican platform meeting since 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower was the nominee.

The Republicans' debates can be contentious and have frequently involved clashes between activists and the presidential nominee's aides. In 2000, for example, conservatives on one subcommittee struck out some education language favored by then-Gov. George W. Bush, but it was largely restored in the full committee, said Candi Wolff, who worked as a platform staffer before becoming the White House's legislative affairs chief, a post she held until December 2007. Back in 1996, the full committee agreed on tax-cut language, but changed it after a last-minute announcement by presumptive presidential nominee Bob Dole that he favored an across-the-board tax cut, said another staffer who worked on that platform.

Language about abortion is usually controversial during the drafting of Republican platforms, if only because it is showcased in the news media as an intraparty dispute. The main players in this controversy are Schlafly and Ann Stone, who runs Republicans for Choice. However, this time around, the sharpest collisions will likely be over immigration and global warming, Wolff said. Despite strenuous opposition from portions of his party, McCain advocated granting millions of illegal immigrants gradual amnesty and curbing the greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists link to global warming.

In recent months, even as he has courted Hispanic voters and business groups that want low-wage workers, McCain has often stressed that he wants to secure U.S. borders before taking other action on immigration. And as gasoline prices skyrocketed, he ended his support for the moratorium on new offshore oil drilling.

Immigration is a sensitive topic within the Republican Party and is barely mentioned on the platform's website. There's no immigration page for visitors to peruse, the topic is not mentioned at the "Jobs & Economic Growth" page, and the "Protecting American Values" page doesn't cite the hot-button issue of English-language promotion. But there's an oblique reference to immigration on the "National Security" page, where platform officials invite viewers to "share thoughts on Russia, China, the European Union, or our relations in Latin America, including along our Southern Border."

Republican National Committee officials would like to muffle disputes by adopting vague language, said a Republican who worked for a previous Platform Committee. "Otherwise, you have these big ugly fights a week before the convention," he said. Platform officials will likely also try to shrink the document, if only to reduce the number of controversial paragraphs. Brevity "definitely requires us to be very selective in what we push for," the Eagle Forum's Echard predicts, "but ... we'll be able to say what we want."