Romney and McCain Trade "L"-Word Charges

With just hours to go before Florida voters go to the polls, Mitt Romney and John McCain traded charges of liberalism:

With less than 24 hours until primary polls open in Florida, top GOP rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney continued a barrage of attacks on each other, freely using the “L”-word to bash one another.

Romney hammered hard on a climate-change bill that McCain has supported with his friend and colleague, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, saying the legislation will result in a tax increase. He also went after McCain for the Arizona senator’s role in campaign finance bill and the failed immigration reform bills.

“If you ask people, ‘Look at the three things Senator McCain has done as a senator,’ if you want that kind of a liberal Democratic course as president, then you can vote for him,” Romney told campaign workers. “But those three pieces of legislation, those aren’t conservative, those aren’t Republican, those are not the kind of leadership that we need as we go forward.”

In response, McCain pointed to flip-flopping and tax-raising on Romney’s behalf, accusing the former Massachusetts governor of “wholesale deception of voters. On every one of the issues he has attacked us on, Mitt Romney was for it before he was against it.”

He added, “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.”

McCain later told a Jacksonville audience that Romney has been “entirely consistent. He’s consistently taken at least two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.”

As it turns out, they're both right. McCain's key legislative achievements (or attempts) could easily be described as liberal proposals. There was nothing conservative about McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), McCain-Kennedy (immigration) or McCain-Lieberman (global warming).

Regarding Romney, he has clearly undergone a change of attitude in his politics. In the past he supported many things, such as gay rights and abortion, which certainly aren't conservative. Whether his conversion to conservatism is real and permanent is unknown.

This is why so many conservatives are getting heartburn about this whole race, and why it would be nice if Fred Thompson was still around.