GOP Candidates Say They'll Be Tightwads

Republican presidential hopeful, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney serves himself dinner at the Sullivan and Merrimack County annual Lincoln Day Dinner in Newbury, N.H., Sunday, April 15, 2007.(AP Photo/Jim Cole) (Jim Cole - AP)

Thus, fiscal restraint is a pillar of all three campaigns.

Lesser-known GOP candidates, including Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, also have taken up the cause. Those three call themselves strong fiscal conservatives, advocating lower taxes and more frugal spending.

It's a message that resonates with Republicans like Rick and Carol Hammen of Clive, Iowa. They list spending, taxes and the economy as second only to security as issues that matter most to them.

"The Republican Party has got to get some backbone. Important bills should not have pork attached, and the veto pen has got to come out," Carol Hammen says. Adds Rick Hammen: "We would be in a lot better shape if we controlled our spending."

Mindful of such sentiments, Giuliani draws on his experiences as mayor of the country's largest city to argue that he practices what he preaches.

"We need to reduce spending," he told a crowd in West Des Moines, Iowa, recently. "That's how you make government more effective, that's how you make government more efficient."

Despite his pitch, records from New York City's independent budget office show the city payroll grew during his tenure and fees and fines increased. Giuliani also successfully sued to challenge the constitutionality of the line-item veto that would have given President Clinton the power to eliminate wasteful spending.

In a visit to Iowa's statehouse in Des Moines, Romney sounded similar themes. "We have to rein in spending," he declared, and then acknowledged: "We spent too much as Republicans."

Echoing a TV ad he's running, Romney proposed capping discretionary nonmilitary spending at the inflation rate minus 1 percent, and he vowed to veto any bill that Congress sends him that's above that level.

His campaign often boasts that he turned a $3 billion budget deficit into a $1 billion surplus as governor. The state's fiscal health clearly improved during his tenure, but state budget analysts say both numbers are inflated. And while Romney refused to raise taxes, he boosted fees for state services and closed so-called corporate tax loopholes in what critics call a back-door tax increase.

McCain gave a speech Monday in Memphis, Tenn., in which he renewed his long-standing campaign to curtail government spending. He frequently tells voters that Republicans lost power in Congress in November because the GOP squandered taxpayers' money.

"The spending got out of control and we got the greatest increase in the size of government since the Great Society," McCain said recently in Mason City, Iowa. He mocked a $3 million plan to study the DNA of bears in Montana and a proposal to build a $223 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.

Then, he declared: "When one of these bills comes across my desk and it has a pork-barrel project in it, I will veto it and I will make the author of it famous, I promise you!"

McCain typically earns high marks from fiscal conservatives for his push to curtail wasteful spending. But critics take issue with his position on taxes. McCain opposed Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 but now advocates extending them. He says that doing otherwise would amount to a tax increase.