McCain, Romney trade insults
Published 10:18 pm Monday, January 28, 2008
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Mitt Romney and John McCain accused each other Monday of being liberals, a charge tantamount to blasphemy in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Meanwhile, polls showed Rudy Giuliani trailing badly in the state where he has bet almost everything in his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination. If he wins on Tuesday, he will have earned the biggest, brashest “I told you so” of his political career.
Lose, and the former New York mayor may be uttering his final words of the campaign.
“Wednesday morning, we’ll make a decision,” he said.
A day before the crucial Florida primary, Romney lambasted the Arizona senator for a host of “liberal answers” to the country’s problems. Among them: McCain’s legislation curbing money in politics, his more forgiving view of illegal immigrants and his backing of an energy bill that Romney said would raise consumer costs.
“And I just don’t think those liberal answers are what America is looking for, not for the Republican Party or for any party, for that matter,” Romney said.
McCain accused Romney of “wholesale deception of voters” and of flip-flopping on the issues.
McCain told a Jacksonville audience that Romney has been “entirely consistent,” then quipped: “He’s consistently taken at least two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.”
Earlier, he said, “The truth is, Mitt Romney was a liberal governor of Massachusetts who raised taxes, imposed with Ted Kennedy a big government mandate health care plan that is now a quarter of a billion dollars in the red, and managed his state’s economy incompetently, leaving Massachusetts with less job growth than 46 other states.”
The Florida primary, with its winner-take-all 57 delegates, is open only to Republican voters; McCain’s other wins, in New Hampshire and South Carolina, were fueled in part by independents able to cast ballots in the GOP contest.
The Republican party stripped Florida of half its delegates because it moved its primary to earlier in the year.
The Democratic contest today in Florida amounts to a beauty contest since the Democratic party has said it would not seat the state’s delegates at its presidential convention in August, also because the state’s primary was moved up.
Next up for the presidential candidates is Super Tuesday, when 22 states will hold primaries and caucuses. At stake Tuesday for Democrats are 1,681 delegates; a candidate needs 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination.
GOP delegates at stake total 975. A candidate needs 1,191 delegates to take the nomination.
