A “senior advisor” out of Boston has told MSNBC that based on the California win “Tomorrow will be a day of frank discussions for the campaign”.

From McCain:

From Romney:

Romney and McCain traded last minute barbs today ahead of Super Tuesday with both candidates continuing questioning each others conservative credentials.

“A lot of people said it is going to be a very easy race for Senator McCain. But across the country conservatives have come together and said, ‘You know what, we don’t want Senator McCain. We want a conservative to be in the White House’,” Romney told supporters in Nashville.

McCain ripped Romney at a campaign rally in Hamilton, New Jersey, saying Romney presided over a “big government, mandated health care plan” as governor of Massachusetts.

McCain said he has long been in favor of cutting federal spending and is a strong proponent of facing down the challenge of Islamic extremism — positions he said are at the heart of conservatism.

“So I’m proud of my record in the Senate as a staunch conservative,” McCain said.

From The Fix a look at how Mitt Romney is capitalizing on Rush Limbaugh’s anti-McCain campaign.

The Romney campaign is sending around an email highlighting one particular passage from Limbaugh’s show today. Here it is:

“I think right now Romney probably — as the campaign has coalesced and as the campaign has progressing on down the highway — I think the one candidate of the three still out there on our side … in saying who more closely embodies all three legs of this conservative stool, you’d have to say that it’s Mitt Romney. There’s actually no choice in the matter. It certainly isn’t Senator McCain.”

In South Carolina Mitt Romney interrupted John McCain’s concession speech and tonight he did the same thing to Rudy Giuliani who was giving a past tense laden speech in Florida. I don’t doubt that the Romney camp wasn’t happy to hear rumors of a potential endorsement by Giuliani of McCain tomorrow and may have feared that it was going to take place tonight. With that said, the guy could have been a little more gracious and let Giuliani have a moment.

From the Associated Press both Mitt Romney & John McCain have accused each other of being liberals.

One day before the crucial Florida primary, Romney lambasted the Arizona senator for a host of “liberal answers” to the country’s problems. Among them: McCain’s legislation curbing money in politics, his more forgiving view of illegal immigrants and his backing of an energy bill that Romney said would raise consumer costs.

“And I just don’t think those liberal answers are what America is looking for, not for the Republican Party or for any party, for that matter,” Romney said in Fort Myers, Fla.

McCain accused Romney of “wholesale deception of voters” and of flip-flopping on the issues.

“On every one of the issues he has attacked us on, Mitt Romney was for it before he was against it,” McCain said.
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 told a Jacksonville audience that Romney has been “entirely consistent,” then quipped: “He’s consistently taken at least two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.”

Mitt Romney is the projected winner of the Republican Nevada Caucus.

From CBS News Mitt Romney got into a “heated” exchange with a reporter today after the former Governor suggested that he doesn’t have lobbyists tied to his campaign while speaking in Columbia, S.C.

“That’s not true, governor!” Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson said “That is not true. Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist.”

The two continued to argue for a little bit after that.

Watch the video below:

The Politico looks over Mitt Romney’s decision to play it light in South Carolina and place his bets instead in Nevada.

Last night as John McCain took to the stage to give his concession speech in South Carolina, he was interrupted, by the winner of the Michigan primary Mitt Romney. Television coverage broke from McCain to Romney breaking what is typical protocol on election night where the winner allows those who lost the chance to speak.

From the New York Times:

Some McCain aides were taken aback that their speech was pre-empted, and said that the McCain campaign manager, Rick Davis, had called the Romney campaign and told them that Mr. McCain was about to speak. “Perhaps it was an accident,’’ said a senior McCain adviser, “but if it wasn’t, it was classless.”

The ill-will between the McCain and Romney camps was evident earlier in the night.

Before the race was called, Steve Schmidt, an adviser to the McCain campaign, told reporters gathered here that, “Mitt Romney has an amazing capacity that many of us hold in awe to be able to look anyone in the eye and tell them that the blue sky is red, that the yellow sun is pink, but at the end of the day, in a presidential contest, voters want someone who will tell them the truth.’’

Though everyone will claim it was a simple mix-up, which it probably was, one thing is for certain. A lot of bad blood is being spilled in this campaign and with the Republican race being hotly contested, things are only going to heat up.