DCRepublican.com

Mon 28 Jan 2008

From the New York Times Caucus Blog:

PANAMA CITY, Fla.—The Romney campaign said Monday that some of their supporters in the Miami area have begun reporting receiving automated phone calls Monday afternoon accusing Mr. Romney of wanting to re-open relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

The claim about the calls ratcheted up tensions in what has emerged as a caustic final day of campaigning ahead of Tuesday’s Republican primary, with charges and counter-charges flying back and forth between Mr. Romney and his rival, Senator John McCain, although a senior Romney campaign official said he was unsure who was behind the calls.

The calls began Monday, soon after some radio ads featuring Roger Noriega, a former State Department official and Romney surrogate, were broadcast in the morning outlining the opposite stance for Mr. Romney, according to, Al Cardenas, Mr. Romney’s campaign chairman in Florida.

Mr. Cardenas called the phone calls “despicable” and pointed out only the McCain and Romney campaigns are doing robo-calls at this point in the Miami area.

The Romney campaign has been doing automated calls to voters impugning Mr. McCain’s vote against the Medicare prescription drug benefit and spotlighting his role in the McCain-Kennedy immigration measure, which would have provided a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and McCain-Feingold, a campaign finance measure reviled by conservatives.

“Those are fine,” Mr. Cardenas said. “His position on those issues is on the record.”

But Mr. Cardenas said making the kind of “outlandish claim” in the phone calls about Cuba “in a community that has obviously been traumatized by this issue” was “dirty.”

The McCain campaign says they’re “absolutely” not behind the calls.

I don’t really think that this is a McCain tactic. He knows how brutal these calls can be from his experiences in South Carolina in 2000, however I don’t see any reason to believe that it wasn’t Rudy Giuliani’s campaign, or supporters behind these calls.

Rudy knows that he has a large number of votes in already from the early and absentee ballots that were submitted. According to the Giuliani campaign, as many as 400,000 early votes have been submitted, which means that there is still a chance that Rudy could place in third.

Obviously, a third place finish would be catastrophic to his campaign and would probably kill his chances of winning the nomination. However, a second place finish would give him the opportunity to raise a little more money from some naive donors who believe that he still has a chance because he was able to beat Mitt Romney.

In reality, if Rudy doesn’t win first, Ron Paul will have more delegates than he does. With that being the case, I really don’t see him carrying on much further, especially with McCain polling higher in New York, Rudy’s home state.