Romney and Huckabee campaigns go head-to-head

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By Dan Gearino | Monday, December 24, 2007 | 15 comment(s)

WEST DES MOINES — The Republican race for the Iowa caucuses is entering its final, brutal phase, with the top two contenders, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, virtually tied in a new poll and trying to find the right balance between nasty and nice.

With two weeks to go before the Jan. 3 caucuses, the candidates held overlapping events just a few miles from each other Wednesday evening in West Des Moines.

Huckabee spoke to an overflow crowd of a few hundred in a narrow shopping mall function room. Up the road, Romney spoke in a hotel ballroom to a crowd of roughly 1,500.

“This is a unique and great land with unique and great people,” Romney said, in a Christmas-themed speech.

Huckabee highlighted his blue-collar upbringing and painted the race as a battle between Main Street America and Washington elites.

“While our opponents are throwing the kitchen sink,” he said, “the people of Iowa and the people of America know that we’re the campaign that’s representing the ordinary average American who sits around his kitchen table and worries about his next paycheck.“

A poll released Wednesday by Rasmussen Reports shows the race has tightened following several weeks when Huckabee was clearly ahead.

Huckabee leads with 28 percent, followed by Romney with 27 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent. U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona is a distant third with 14 percent. Former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are tied for fourth with 8 percent each.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, led in Iowa for most of the year, until he was passed by Huckabee in late November. Romney has the largest Republican campaign staff in the state and he has spent the most money on advertising.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, spent most of the year in the back of the pack, with little money and almost no staff. His campaign was energized by his second-place finish in the Ames straw poll in August. Since then, he has climbed to the top in Iowa, helped by strong debate performances and lingering doubts about Romney and other contenders.

In response to Huckabee’s surge, Romney and other GOP candidates have spent weeks attacking Huckabee in mailers and over the airwaves. The attacks accuse him of being too eager to raise taxes, too soft on illegal immigrants, and too inexperienced on foreign policy.

Huckabee told reporters that Romney’s attacks are “dishonest” and “desperate.”

“If I believed all that stuff, I wouldn’t even vote for me,” he said.

While Romney focused on the positive in West Des Moines, he was on the offensive earlier in the day in Davenport. He blasted Huckabee for his statement in Foreign Affairs magazine that the Bush administration has an “arrogant bunker mentality” in its foreign policy.

“I think the president is a man who has acted out of a desire to do what is right for America,” Romney said.

Huckabee has refused to run his own attack ads. Instead, his latest television spot is a Christmas greeting, with “Silent Night” playing in the background.

An undecided voter at the Romney event, Diane Johansen of Urbandale, said she doesn’t mind all the negative ads. She thinks voters need to know the pluses and minuses of every candidate.

“We just have to muddle through and make some reasonable decisions,” she said.

Johansen said she is deciding between Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani.

(Ed Tibbetts of the Quad-City Times contributed to this story.)

Dan Gearino can be contacted at

(515) 243-0138 and dan.gearino@lee.net. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.