ROCHESTER, N.H. — A Mitt Romney campaign event Friday night offered a taste of the coming rumble in New Hampshire with Senator John McCain now emerging as Mr. Romney’s main rival in the state’s upcoming Republican primary.
Mr. Romney challenged Mr. McCain directly for the first time in months in the state, pointing out before an audience of about 100 people here while talking about his belief in tax cuts that Mr. McCain had voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001.
“President Bush did a pretty courageous thing,” Mr. Romney said. “At a time when our economy needed a boost, needed a stimulus, he said, ‘You know what, we’re going to lower taxes.’ And not everyody agreed with him. One of my friends is Senator McCain. He voted against the Bush tax cuts. I think the Bush tax cuts were a great thing for our country. I support them. I want to make them permanent and I want to add to them.”
He added: “I want to kill the death tax once and for all. We had a chance to do that by the way. Senator McCain also voted against that.”
Mr. Romney continues to lead in state polls but had been mostly skirmishing with Republican rival Rudolph W. Giuliani in the state until recently. But Mr. Giuliani recently pulled back on his advertising in the state and Mr. McCain has moved solidly into second place, within striking distance of Mr. Romney in polls with the state’s Jan. 8 primary fast approaching.
Mr. McCain was one of two Republican senators to vote against the $1.35 trillion tax cut measure in 2001. Opponents of the bill argued the bill benefited mainly the wealthy and would be costly for the federal deficit. Mr. McCain voted against President Bush’s tax cut proposals in 2003 as well for similar reasons.
Mr. McCain was also one of two Republican senators who voted against a measure to permanently repeal the estate tax, also known as the death tax, in 2001. Mr. McCain opposed a permanent repeal for fiscal reasons but later supported an alternative measure that would have narrowed the estate tax to apply only to the extremely wealthy.
He now says he believes President Bush’s tax cuts should be made permanent, causing critics to accuse him of reversing himself on the issue.
When Mr. Romney turned to questions Friday night from the audience, a man, who Romney officials confronted afterward and accused of being a plant from the McCain campaign, challenged Mr. Romney and accused him of flip-flopping on the Bush tax cuts.
“Tonight you’ve attacked your opponents for their failure to support the Bush tax cuts but to be entire fairly, sir, you yourself failed to endorse the Bush tax cuts as Governor in 2003, saying you wouldn’t be a cheerleader for a tax plan you didn’t support,” said the man, who refused to give his name to reporters afterward. “Isn’t your attack tonight, sir, hypocritical in this respect and is that not yet another flip flop added to the ranks identified by meet the press last Sunday?”
The man was alluding to a 2003 article in the Boston Globe that quoted an anonymous observer at a meeting between Mr. Romney and the Massachusetts congressional delegation who said the governor told the lawmakers that he “won’t be a cheerleader” for proposals he did not agree with, “but I have to keep a solid relationship with the White House.”
Publicly, Mr. Romney refused to come out at the time for or against the tax cuts, saying he did not want to get involved in national politics. And that was the explanation he gave in his defense on Friday.
“Actually what I said on the first occasion I was asked about it, I said, ‘I’m busy being governor,’” Mr. Romney said. “I know our economy needs a stimulus but I didn’t take a position and I said I neither support nor oppose because I’m governor of Masschusetts.”
He added: “You see, I wasn’t a U.S. Senator. I didn’t have to vote on this. I didn’t get a choice to. I was running my state so I didn’t have a comment on my positon. I said I’m not weighing in on federal issue. But Senator McCain was a senator. He had to vote. He had to decide am I in favor of pursuing these tax cuts or not and he voted against the tax cuts twice. That’s a very different position.”
Romney’s state director, Jim Merrill, and one of his New Hampshire political consultants, Rich Killion, exchanged words with the questioner afterward, telling reporters he had harassed Romney at events before, including one time when he held up a McCain sign.
The man would only give his name as “Sam” to reporters, saying he was undecided and a Massachusetts resident who simply remembered what Romney had said about the Bush tax cuts while governor.
The Romney campaign later supplied to reporters a YouTube video that showed what appeared to be the same man heckling Mr. Romney with a bullhorn at a campaign event in Amherst over the summer.
Let the games begin.
