Mitt Romney bashed on healthcare, immigration at Vegas debate

The 2012 Republican debates turned raucous, and highly personal, Tuesday night as front-running Mitt Romney got dragged into the fray over his Massachusetts healthcare plan and onetime hiring of illegal immigrants.

Gov. Rick Perry, attempting to reverse his precipitous slide in the polls, was Romney’s main antagonist, though it wasn’t clear that the Texan’s latest performance would, by itself, turn his flagging campaign around or improve his favorability ratings among Republican voters.

Perry, whose support for giving illegal immigrants tuition aid helped trigger that downward slide, launched a preemptive strike on Romney over the topic at a CNN-sponsored debate at the Venetian/Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas.

“The idea that you stand here before us and talk about that you’re strong on immigration is, on its face, the height of hypocrisy,” Perry said to a mixture of boos and applause from the audience — though Romney had yet to speak on the issue.

Perry’s remark was designed to revive a controversy that hurt Romney in the 2008 campaign: his family’s repeated hiring of undocumented immigrants to care for the lawn at his Massachusetts house.

“Rick, I don’t think that I’ve ever hired an illegal in my life,” replied Romney, prompting Perry to interject that his rival had, in essence, just lied to the American people.

The two Republicans swapped charges about their respective positions on amnesty for immigrants who are in the country illegally. At one point, Romney put his hand on Perry’s shoulder in an attempt to silence his foe, who was trying to talk over his answer.

Romney belittled Perry over the Texas governor’s strained efforts to improve his debate performance.

“This has been a tough couple of debates for Rick, and I understand that,” Romney said. “And so you’re going to get – you’re going to get testy.”

In criticizing the increase in illegal immigration in Texas, Romney derided Perry’s candidacy at another point. He said that Perry’s claim to have experience in dealing with illegal immigration as a border state governor for more than a decade was “a bit like” a college football “coach that’s lost 40 games in a row” claiming he “has the experience to go to the NFL.”

Romney tangled sharply with another rival, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who attacked the Massachusetts healthcare law signed by Romney that became a model for President Obama’s healthcare plan.

“I’m sorry, Rick, that you find so much to dislike in my plan. But I’ll tell you, the people of Massachusetts like it by about a 3 to 1 margin,” Romney said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said “There’s a lot of big government behind “Romneycare,” not as much as “Obamacare,” but a heck of a lot more than — than your campaign is admitting.”

Romney responded that he got the idea of an individual mandate — the most heavily criticized feature of both his plan and Obama’s — from Gingrich and the conservative Heritage Foundation, who formerly supported it.

The exchanges involving Romney somewhat overshadowed the expected focus of the debate: a series of attacks on businessman Herman Cain’s tax-simplification proposal.

Most of the other candidates piled on the businessman from Atlanta -- who topped the Republican field in at least one recent national poll -- by claiming that his “9-9-9” tax-simplification plan would unfairly hurt lower- and middle-income Americans.

“If we give Congress a 9% sales tax, how long will it take a liberal president and a liberal Congress to run that up to maybe 90%?” asked Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

And Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the staunchest anti-tax advocate in the race, called Cain’s plan “regressive.” He said it would force millions of poor and working-class Americans to start paying taxes, and “I don’t think that we should even things up by raising taxes.”

Perry, twice addressing Cain as “brother,” said the proposal was “not going to fly” because it would impose a 9% sales tax in places, such as politically influential New Hampshire, that have no state sales tax.

Cain responded that those attacks were mixing apples (state taxes) and oranges (federal taxes) and urged viewers to go to his campaign website and estimate the impact of the plan on their own finances.

That left it to Gingrich to portray himself as something of a peacemaker.

“Herman Cain deserves a lot of credit. He’s had the courage to go out and take a specific, very big idea,” said the former speaker, to applause from the crowd. “He has us at least talking about something that matters, as opposed to the junk that all too often is masquerading as politics in this country.”

The debate was the second in a week and the eighth in a series that, since May, has shaped perceptions of the candidates in a fluid GOP contest.

Nevada will hold the third delegate contest of 2012 in January, less than three months from now. The state is an economic disaster area, with the country’s highest rates of home foreclosures and joblessness (13.4%).

Immigration is also a key issue; more than one out of five voting-age Nevadans is part of the state’s rapidly expanding Latino population.

Adding to the sporting-event atmosphere, the debate began, as did a previous CNN-sponsored debate, with the singing of the national anthem. The lengthy preliminaries were designed to disguise the foreshortened nature of the event, which involved less than the two full hours of debate time given at previous forums.

paul.west@latimes.com