In New Hampshire, Mitt Romney preaches unity

As Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington struggled to find agreement on spending cuts and the debt limit, Mitt Romney struck a conciliatory note in New Hampshire on Monday by lamenting partisan feuding while touting his own record of working with Democrats -- even the Senate’s onetime liberal lion Ted Kennedy.

Taking a pause from a whirlwind fundraising tour for two campaign appearances, Romney faced questions from voters that reflected frustration with the gridlock in Washington. During a business roundtable at a technology company in Salem, State Sen. Chuck Morse pressed Romney to explain how he would unite “a country that’s very divided.”

“Quite honestly, it’s not working and they’re not getting the message in Washington right now,” Morse told the Republican frontrunner.

A short while later at Lincoln Financial Group in Concord, Romney’s first questioner told the candidate he was troubled by how polarized the country had become. “We’re either on the extreme left or the extreme right, but in the past America has become great by compromise and going down the middle of the road,” Stephen Smith, 57, an independent, told Romney. “What do you propose doing to bring America back together?”

The questions were a reminder of the competing imperatives that Republican candidates face in New Hampshire, where they must win over the party’s most passionate conservative activists while also appealing to independent voters who can cast ballots in the first-in-the nation primary next year.

Attempting to straddle that line, Romney charged that Obama had failed to work in a spirit of bipartisanship and used his first two years “to jam through” legislation he described as “strictly partisan,” including the president’s controversial healthcare program and the changes to financial regulatory system. By way of contrast, Romney said during his early years as governor he held weekly meetings with Democrats who dominated the Massachusetts Legislature after realizing that to get something done he “had to be friendly.”

Collaboration in Massachusetts was possible, Romney told business leaders in Salem, because he didn’t attack lawmakers from the other party as “a bunch of Neanderthals.” After his first two years, he noted that he printed campaign brochures that bore not only his own picture, but that of state Democratic leaders “because we had to work together, and the success of one was the success of all.”

Romney threaded plenty of criticism of the president through his remarks Monday, but his call for civility was reminiscent of the tone of another rival, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, in his 2012 campaign announcement last week.

And it stood in contrast to some of the more strident rhetoric from leading Republicans aligned with the “tea party,” like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has not decided whether to enter the race, and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who announced her run for the presidency in Iowa on Monday.

At both stops, Romney pointed to the warmth between former President Ronald Reagan and former Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill as an example of what is needed in the Capitol.

“I worked with [former Massachusetts Sen.] Ted Kennedy, for Pete’s sakes,” Romney said in Concord (pointedly noting that they disagreed on “almost everything”).

He recalled to laughter that at one bill signing the late Massachusetts Democrat had joked that when he and Romney agreed on a piece of legislation “it proves only one thing -- one of us didn’t read it.”

“The truth was we had both read it and we’d found some common ground,” Romney told several hundred employees at Liberty Financial in Concord on Monday, “and I think that has to happen in Washington.”