Rivalry heats up for GOP contenders

Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani clashed over taxes Thursday in a flare-up that illustrated a sharpening rivalry between the two leading contenders for the 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 for victories 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 and other big states.

So in New Hampshire, Giuliani and Romney are tussling hard over fiscal conservatives.

“Fiscal restraint for New Hampshire Republicans is back-to-basics conservatism,” said presidential primaries expert Dante Scala, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.

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Romney opens fire

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 Republican former 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 advisor 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.

Romney’s assault came a day after Giuliani, on a swing across southern New Hampshire, trumpeted his record of cutting taxes in New York.

“Isn’t this what Washington needs right now, somebody who can get rid of those earmarks?” Giuliani asked a roomful of voters at a forum in Windham.

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Running close in polls

Giuliani has led national polls of Republican voters but runs just behind Romney in New Hampshire. Running third in the New Hampshire polls is Arizona Sen. John McCain, who won the state’s GOP primary in 2000 and badly needs a victory there.

As Giuliani campaigned in New Hampshire on Wednesday, he was more subtle than Romney in drawing contrasts with his chief opponent. Without mentioning the former governor by name, Giuliani echoed Romney’s critics who say his shifts on abortion and other issues cast doubt on his credibility.

“You’ve got to be who you are,” Giuliani told reporters outside the Red Arrow diner in Manchester after greeting patrons eating bacon and eggs. “You can’t twist yourself up into five different people. It doesn’t work, anyway. All you guys figure it out anytime you try to do that.”

For weeks, Romney has been questioning Giuliani’s record on illegal immigration, and Thursday he challenged Giuliani’s argument that he is the only Republican who can defeat the Democratic nominee. While Giuliani says his appeal to moderates would enable him to win New York and other states that normally lean Democratic, Romney said a Republican must be “strong on social issues” to maintain a coalition with voters concerned about economic and security matters.

“I’d be surprised if the winning strategy is to try to win in New York,” Romney said. “That’s not the state that’s going to get the Republicans in the White House.”

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michael.finnegan@latimes.com