McCain stresses tax issue in try for 1 more N.H. win

GOFFSTOWN, N.H. - Senator John McCain came and went yesterday to "Johnny B. Goode," the campaign standard whose jittery chords escorted him to two campaign-saving New Hampshire primary victories, but he left behind the style of joyful reformer or defiant warrior that once carried him through.

Instead he arrived at a chilly hockey arena with common New Hampshire stump speech fare - a pungent caricature of his opponent as a lover of high taxes - in what could be McCain's last attempt to reclaim turf he once considered a second political home, but now sees being claimed by Democrat Barack Obama.

"He talks about our economy in a detached and academic way, forgetting that the goal is not to redistribute wealth but to create it," McCain said at St. Anselm College before a crowd of a cou ple thousand, no bigger than some of those that filled his primary-season town-hall meetings in 2000 and 2008. "The redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now."

Yesterday, McCain delivered his most detailed critique yet of the Democratic nominee's tax cut proposals, which McCain said would punish small-business owners while rewarding those who do not pay income taxes.

"As my opponent sees it, there's a strict limit to your earnings as well, and it's for the politicians to decide. The proper amount of wealth is not what you can earn, but what government will let you keep," McCain said at the Catholic school.

A colorful but focused appeal on fiscal issues - including a promise to "take a meat axe" to the federal budget - replaced the broader calls for bipartisanship and reform that McCain used to reach beyond Republicans in his New Hampshire primary campaigns. Largely shelved, too, were the broadsides against Obama's foreign-policy credentials and character.

"The economy is the main issue in New Hampshire, like the rest of the country, and security and reform are a little less in the forefront," said McCain adviser Steve Duprey.

Fergus Cullen, chairman of the state Republican Party, said that message will resonate in New Hampshire, which has no state income tax.

"Taxes are especially relevant here," Cullen said. "What we're seeing is the closing argument. It's a very fertile message, combined with his reform agenda that was the foundation of his support in New Hampshire going back ten years."

McCain's strategists have long hoped that the candidate's personal ties to New Hampshire - including support among independents and Democrats who have played key roles in his winning primary coalitions - would offer some insulation from a cold environment for Republicans due to the dominance of the economy and the Bush administration's unpopularity.

"I do think McCain's reputation in New Hampshire as a maverick and a reformer is still very potent and will help us," said Duprey. "I think the difficulties we are having right now are tied to the big imbalance in spending by the two campaigns. We can overcome that with visits and with our mail and voter programs."

Advisers said yesterday they had not determined whether McCain would visit New Hampshire again before Nov. 4. He badly needs the state's four electoral votes. But the partisan environment - Democratic candidates are leading in races at all levels in this once conservative state - has punished McCain, who has lagged Obama in every poll taken here in the last month. "New Hampshire is turning into Massachusetts," said Joe Kenney, the Republican candidate for governor. "Our state is changing."

But McCain's affection for a state where he twice won comfortable primary victories due to late surges - in 2000 as an under-funded upstart and in 2008 as a fallen front-runner - appeared unshaken.

"I love you. I love New Hampshire," he said yesterday. "Some of my happiest, happiest memories are in this state."

"The people of New Hampshire make their own decisions, and more than once, they've ignored the polls and the pundits, and brought me across the finish line first. I can't think of any place I'd rather be as Election Day draws close than running an underdog campaign in the State of New Hampshire."

At the outset of the general-election campaign, McCain advisers said they wished the rest of the country was just like New Hampshire: a place where candidates would be rewarded by voters for delivering unpopular opinions to people unready to hear them.

Yesterday, Cindy McCain praised her husband in terms she has not used recently elsewhere, as someone who "went up against his own party and went up against a lot of people who thought he was wrong."

New Hampshire remains one of two states, along with Pennsylvania, where McCain's campaign sees particular opportunity to exploit unresolved primary-season fissures among Democrats. McCain pointedly mentioned Obama's disagreements with Hillary Clinton during a Democratic primary debate over capital gains tax rates, and even praised her husband's tax policy as president.

Several local elected officials who supported Clinton in the primary have endorsed McCain in recent weeks, and Republican strategists are now using micro-targeting data to identify blue-collar white voters who could be persuaded to make the same conversion, Cullen said.

"At first I was for Obama. I thought he could be the nucleus for change," said Joe Johnson, a landscaper. But he said he turned to McCain three weeks ago, saying of Obama. "I can't stand him now. I'm a businessman and he wants to take all my taxes."

Advisers scrapped plans for McCain to host a town-hall meeting - the candidate's preferred free-for-all format - yesterday after he was confronted two weeks ago by a series of angry conservative supporters at such an event in Minnesota.

"The number of people seeing John McCain here for the first time was 20 percent, I'd guess," Cullen said. "What can Barack Obama say to New Hampshire voters that they don't already know?"

"We're not immune to national trends," he went on. "But McCain has a stronger base, a higher floor, and a higher ceiling in New Hampshire than anywhere else."

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.