GOP Squabbling Grows Louder

The clock ticking on their fates, the Republican presidential candidates tussled across much of the breadth of America on Wednesday, the anxiety of the final spurt before the Iowa caucuses betrayed by their increasingly quarrelsome rhetoric.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, in New York, accused Texas Gov. George W. Bush of a “desperation” attack that had careened off the high road to which Bush had pledged to keep. Bush, in New Hampshire, belittled McCain’s tax proposals as Washington gobbledygook: “Sounds like a Senate subcommittee. Do I hear a motion for amendment? And do I hear a second?”

Businessman Steve Forbes, camped out in the Iowa towns that will determine his political future on Monday night, blasted both of them as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

The hottest dispute remained over taxes, and which of the Republicans was telling the truth about his own and his competitors’ plans. Needless to say, they disagreed--and both Bush and McCain felt compelled to brandish outside audits that confirmed their own views.

To some extent, Wednesday marked the last day when attention will be focused anywhere but Iowa until caucus night. Bush, who spent most of the day in New Hampshire, where the first primary will be held Feb. 1, moved back into Iowa for the duration. Forbes was planning to stay until Monday as well. Only McCain, who is not seriously campaigning in Iowa, planned to stump elsewhere in the country--in his case, in the Northeast and in South Carolina, where he hopes to compete if he survives New Hampshire.

The dust-up over taxes ranged from the airwaves, where commercials touting and debunking the various plans were omnipresent, to the rhetoric from the candidates themselves.

Bush aggressively went after McCain on Wednesday in New Hampshire, where the governor would like to derail McCain’s strong effort. He argued that McCain’s plan to close existing tax loopholes would impose $40 billion in taxes on employees’ benefits. His staff handed out reports from the Congressional Research Service, an arm of the Library of Congress, to buttress Bush’s view.

“This is going to be a tax on educational benefits, on transportation, on meals,” Bush declared during a press conference in Plaistow, N.H.

McCain unveiled his tax plan last year, and added new details this month. He has also spent the last week defending those details from attacks by Bush. Bush characterized the most recent McCain comments as a change in the McCain plan, and sneered that they reminded him of Senate amendments.

“It’s important when someone runs for president to lay out a plan that is consistent, that’ll stand the test of political scrutiny. . . . That’s what I’ve done. That’s what a leader does,” said Bush, who has long tried to cast McCain as a captive of the Beltway culture.

Delving into the theatrical, Bush also sent two top campaign operatives--economics advisor Larry Lindsey and Ohio Rep. Rob Portman--to McCain’s national headquarters in Virginia to peruse the senator’s tax plan. They were treated to reams of paper, doughnuts and copies of McCain’s best-selling autobiography.

“It was as polite as a rugby scrum,” said McCain campaign manager John Weaver.

McCain himself was less embracing, frustrated at Bush’s continued lambasting of his economic plan. He released copies of a report from the Arlington, Va.,-based Fiscal Associates Inc., which seconded his view that his loophole provision would result in a mere $4 billion in taxes over five years, all levied on employers and not their workers.

“It’s just flat wrong and we have proved it,” McCain said in New York, where he addressed high-ranking leaders of American Jewish groups.

“I don’t know if it’s a negative ad or an attack ad, but they know it’s inaccurate and we know it’s inaccurate,” he added.

Addressing the Jewish leaders, McCain returned to a strong suit, foreign policy, and deplored what he termed the Clinton administration’s “feckless, photo op” approach. But attention inevitably returned to the tax issue, and McCain sought to turn it to his advantage by accusing Bush’s plan of more harshly taxing traditional families with only one working spouse.

In Iowa, McCain’s efforts to knock down Bush got some assistance from Forbes, who spent the day slamming the front-runner on a host of issues and tossing in criticism of McCain for good measure. In a Times poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers published this week, Forbes trailed Bush, 43% to 25%.

Trying to replicate the strong second-place finishes of the Rev. Pat Robertson in 1988 and Patrick J. Buchanan in 1996, Forbes appealed to social conservatives with a blend of abortion and tax gibes. He struck particularly at Bush’s record in Texas, where he was elected governor in 1994.

He called Bush and McCain the “timid twins” on taxes, too willing to preserve the status quo instead of dynamiting it with a flat tax, like the one he has proposed.

“It’s like comparing which watered-down beer is better,” Forbes said. “It’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee, same-old, same-old. Why not get to the heart of the problem, which is the tax code?”

Forbes also took Bush to task on the issue of abortion, calling the governor “a pacifist” and himself an “activist” who would press for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Bush opposes abortion but has said he would not make it a litmus test for appointees to the Supreme Court.

“Make no mistake; the ground is shifting,” Forbes said before several dozen people gathered at the Boone County Historical Center. “We can make it happen.”

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga with Bush, T. Christian Miller with McCain and O’Connor with Forbes. It was written by Decker in Los Angeles.