MANCHESTER, N.H. — Their critiques crackling with animosity, Republican presidential candidates took turns Saturday upbraiding one another -- and, much of the time, former New Hampshire front-runner Mitt Romney -- in a debate whose tension illustrated the grave stakes in Tuesday's primary for many of the men on the stage.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, came under sequential fire from Arizona Sen. John McCain on his campaign ads, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani on immigration, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on his support for the war in Iraq, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson on government mandates, and, in a series of meandering commentaries on a host of subjects, Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
The sharpest exchanges came on immigration, when McCain braced Romney on his criticism of McCain's immigration plan.
His voice icy, McCain turned to Romney and said: "It's not amnesty. And for you to describe it as you do in the attack ads, my friend, you can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it won't be true."
"I don't describe your plan as amnesty in my ad," Romney, a multimillionaire, replied. "I don't call it amnesty." The former governor is running an ad in New Hampshire against McCain that includes the words, "He wrote the amnesty bill that America rejected."
Minutes later, McCain responded to a separate Romney claim that he had been misquoted on illegal immigration by alluding to Romney's changes of position or nuance on several key issues, such as abortion rights. "When you change . . . positions on issues from time to time," McCain said, deadpan, "you will get misquoted."
The debate came two days after the Iowa caucuses upended the Republican contest by anointing Huckabee over Romney, who had long led in Iowa polls. That threw the race into New Hampshire, where Romney has been slumping in the polls and McCain, who won the state's primary in 2000, has been rising. The two of them have bitterly disagreed over the last several days.
But the race is not limited to them, nor was the debate, which was nationally broadcast from St. Anselm College by one of its sponsors, ABC.
Though Huckabee's prospects are a long shot in New Hampshire, he has performed under the bright lights since his Iowa victory, and his exchanges with Romney animated the initial part of the debate Saturday. Thompson, for his part, needs to continue to do well to fuel his campaign, which many thought would end in Iowa. Giuliani is seeking to keep his campaign moving until Florida's Jan. 29 primary, where he hopes a win will propel him into the 24 state contests Feb 5. Both he and Thompson injected themselves into the debate regularly, often as foils to the more combative participants.
