CE Week #6: “GOP rivals wage fiscal fight”
Romney, Giuliani trade barbs on taxes
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Michael Finnegan
Los Angeles Times
October 5, 2007
MANCHESTER, N.H. – Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani clashed over taxes Thursday in a flare-up that illustrated a sharpening rivalry between two leading contenders for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
Campaigning in southern New Hampshire, Romney pounded Giuliani’s fiscal record as mayor of New York. The Giuliani campaign snapped back, calling Romney a hypocrite who as governor of Massachusetts showed little restraint with public money.
The spat was part of an increasingly fierce battle by each man to be perceived in New Hampshire, a state with no income tax and a strong anti-tax tradition, as a paragon of fiscal discipline.
More broadly, it captured the intensifying conflict between two candidates who are taking starkly different tacks in the race for the nomination but whose ambitions are colliding head-on here.
Romney is banking on winning the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary to build momentum elsewhere. He has sought to unite religious conservatives behind him, especially in Iowa.
Giuliani’s liberal stands on abortion and other social issues have positioned him poorly in culturally conservative Iowa. But he is counting on a New Hampshire win to foreshadow a sweep of the Feb. 5 primaries in California, New York, Florida and other big states.
So in New Hampshire, Giuliani and Romney are tussling hard over fiscal conservatives.
At St. Anselm College on Thursday, Romney criticized Giuliani for going to court to overturn the line-item veto that Congress approved under President Clinton. Giuliani won the case in the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It is the single most important tool we have to stop excessive spending, and that was a serious mistake,” Romney said.
He also took issue with Giuliani’s refusal to sign a no-new-taxes pledge and slammed the former mayor for suing to preserve an income tax that New York City imposed on people who worked in the city but lived elsewhere.
“Can you imagine a greater outrage than this, which is that not only did you have to pay the local taxes in New York City if you were commuting there, but you had a special tax applied to you called the commuter tax?” Romney asked.
“Can you imagine,” he added, “what would have happened up here in New Hampshire if I, as governor of Massachusetts, said everybody who commutes to Massachusetts is going to have to pay an extra special tax as a commuter? It just seems absolutely wrong.”
In response, Giuliani’s team dispatched another former Republican governor of Massachusetts, Paul Cellucci, to attack Romney’s fiscal record during a conference call with reporters. He described Romney’s attack as “some desperation as the polls close in.”
Giuliani supports the line-item veto, he said, but only by constitutional amendment.
The senior Giuliani adviser also faulted Romney for approving “no broad-based tax cuts” as governor.
“And talk about hypocrisy: One of the loopholes he closed was that he increased income taxes on people who did not reside in Massachusetts but were employed or had a business in Massachusetts,” Cellucci added.
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