By AP/PHILIP ELLIOTT

(CONCORD, N.H.) — New Hampshire’s attorney general is investigating phone calls to voters that pretend to be opinion polls but then undercut presidential contender Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith — and make favorable statements about Republican rival John McCain.

McCain says they’re not his doing and he wants them stopped. Romney says it’s a religious attack and “un-American.”

McCain said of the phone calling, “It is disgraceful, it is outrageous, and it is a violation, we believe, of New Hampshire law.” His campaign asked the attorney general to investigate, and McCain, campaigning Friday in Colorado, asked other candidates to join in the request.

One McCain adviser, Chuck Douglas, said “we believe it is being done by one of the other campaigns. We don’t know which one.”

Western Wats, a Utah-based company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to people who received the calls. In politics, this type of phone surveying is called “push polling” — contacting potential voters and asking questions intended to plant a message, usually negative, rather than gauging attitudes.

A spokesman for the company would not comment on whether it made the calls. However, its client services director, Robert Maccabee, said, “Western Wats has never, currently does not, nor will it ever engage in push polling.”

The 20-minute calls started on Sunday in New Hampshire and Iowa. At least seven people in the two early voting states received the calls, some as recently as Thursday.

Deputy Attorney General Bud Fitch said New Hampshire has never prosecuted a case involving such calls but was moving forward. He cautioned against expecting an immediate resolution.

“Generally, these investigations can take at least several days and sometimes several weeks,” Fitch said.

Among the questions the caller asked was whether the person receiving the call knew Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney’s faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.

“It started out like all the other calls. … Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative,” said Anne Baker, an independent voter who was called in Hollis, N.H.

In Iowa, Romney supporter and state representative Ralph Watts got a call on Wednesday.

“I was offended by the line of questioning,” Watts said. “I don’t think it has any place in politics.”

Romney, campaigning in Las Vegas, said Friday, “The attempts to attack me on the basis of my faith are un-American.”

The former Massachusetts governor’s Mormon faith has been an issue in his presidential bid, especially with conservative evangelicals who are central to his strategy to cast himself as the candidate for the GOP’s family values voters.

Baker, who got a call in New Hampshire, said the caller initially wouldn’t tell her who was behind it. Eventually, Baker was told the caller was from Western Wats.

Last year, Western Wats conducted polling that was intended to spread negative messages about Democratic candidates in a House race in New York and a Senate race in Florida, according to reports in The Tampa Tribune and the Albany Times Union, which also said Western Wats conducted the calls on behalf of the Tarrance Group.

That Virginia-based firm now works for Romney’s rival, Rudy Giuliani. The campaign has paid the firm more than $400,000, according to federal campaign reports.

In his statement on behalf of Western Wats, Maccabee said the company was not currently conducting “any work for … The Tarrance Group in the state of New Hampshire or Iowa, nor have we for the period in question.”

Maccabee added that confidentiality agreements prohibit the company from commenting on specific projects or clients.

Ed Goeas, chief of the Tarrance Group, said there is no connection between the Giuliani campaign and Western Wats.

“I know absolutely it’s not us,” Goeas said. “I can say with absolute, no, it’s not us.”

Western Wats also worked for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. Employees said they used such calls at that time to describe GOP rival Steve Forbes as pro-abortion rights.

New Hampshire law requires that all political advertising, including phone calls, identify the candidate being supported. No candidate was identified in the calls.

Whoever is behind the calls, Romney said part of the blame must go to the 2002 McCain-Feingold law that limits campaign contributions. The phone campaign, he said, “points out how ineffective it has been in removing the influence of money and underhanded politics.” He added, “I have seen over the last several weeks more and more reports of e-mails, of literature being passed out and now push polls which attack me on the basis of religion, and I think that’s very disappointing and un-American.”

Last night was a tale of two debates.

The first 15 minutes of the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas featured clashes between the top three candidates — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards — over Social Security, Iran and telling the truth.

The next hour and 45 minutes were, well, slower. All seven candidates got into the act, offering bits of their stump speeches and trying to cajole CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer into giving them a little more speaking time.

Anyone who reads the Fix regularly (Fixistas unite!) knows which part of the debate we liked better.

Below you’ll find the night’s winners and losers (according to The Fix). Ranking the candidates’ performances is an inherently subjective exercise so remember this is just one man’s opinion. Disagree? Or — fingers crossed — agree? Sound off in the comments section.

WINNERS

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Clinton’s performance in tonight’s debate will quiet (if not totally silence) talk that her campaign is struggling. Clinton set the tone early on by pushing back aggressively against Obama and Edwards and, in our mind, got the best of both exchanges. She was clearly aided by a sympathetic crowd who decided early on that they weren’t interested in watching the candidates fight. As a result, Clinton largely got a pass on her three biggest weaknesses: her equivocation on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, her vote to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and her vote in favor of the 2002 use of force resolution against Iraq. On a question about playing the gender card — another potential problem area — Clinton was clearly prepared and delivered her line of the night: “People are not attacking me because I am a woman, they are attacking me because I am ahead.”

Barack Obama: Yes, we know he fumbled the same question (driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants) that Clinton muffed in the last debate. And, yes, of course he should have known that sort of question was coming and been better prepared to answer it cleanly. But, put that flub aside and Obama offered himself as a credible and — more importantly — safe alternative to Clinton in last night’s debate. The first 15 minutes were dominated by a back and forth between him and Clinton (a good thing for a campaign trying to turn this into a two-person race) and for much of the rest of the debate Obama offered his “we can do more” vision succinctly and forcefully. “Don’t keep on assuming we can’t do something,” Obama scolded Blitzer at one point. “I am running for president because I think we can do it.”

Joe Biden: We can’t help it, we like the guy. Biden is regularly the life of these debates — launching self deprecating one-liners one minute and riffing on how he was introducing legislation before some of the candidates on the stage were even born the next. Biden is at his best when talking foreign policy and he got plenty of opportunities to do that last night. He spoke eloquently about the dangers posed by Iran and scored points on Pakistan by noting that he had spoken to both President Pervez Musharraf and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto before President Bush had.

LOSERS

John Edwards: For those pushing the idea that Clinton’s decision to directly respond to Edwards was a sign that the race is now officially a three-way contest, we say hogwash. Clinton effectively shot Edwards down in their first exchange and when Edwards tried to again go at Clinton later in the debate he was all but booed down by the audience. Make no mistake: Edwards is an able debater who clearly knows what he believes and says it. But, for most of last night’s debate it felt as though he were extraneous to the proceedings and when he did get his speaking time he seemed slightly too keyed up for the audience.

Chris Dodd: Despite his new haircut (we like it), Dodd had trouble standing out. His best moment was his impromptu Spanish outburst — he was in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, he helpfully added — but it wasn’t enough to truly get him noticed. Dodd’s problem in the debates is symptomatic of his larger problem in the race: he doesn’t fit any niche. And, without a niche, he winds up falling through the cracks (humor us; it’s been a long week.)

Debate Fairness Complaints: Going into these events, everyone knows the deal: the candidates at the top of state and national polls are going to get the most questions directed at them and the majority of the speaking time. If you aren’t in that top tier, you have to find your own way to stand out (see Biden, Joe). Politics ain’t beanbag.

By Chris Cillizza |  November 16, 2007; 8:00 AM ET  | Category:  Eye on 2008
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