While former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney campaigned in Des Moines last week, Representative Leonard Boswell publicly criticized the Republican presidential front-runner for the second time this month. The eight-term Democrat authored a guest column in the November 16 Des Moines Register criticizing Romney’s position on health care for veterans. His latest attack focused more broadly on Romney’s position on taxes and entitlement programs.

The Iowa Democratic Party has issued many press releases and staged many press conferences criticizing Romney in recent months. On November 23, state party chair Sue Dvorsky and Boswell scheduled a conference call for reporters to coincide with Romney’s latest Iowa visit. The IDP posted audio from the call here. Among other things, Dvorsky said the failure of Congressional Republicans to extend the payroll tax cuts would raise taxes on working middle-class families by as much as $1,500. She slammed Romney for characterizing the payroll tax cut as a “little band-aid.”

Side note: At about the 2:00 mark in the recording, Dvorsky described Romney as “shockingly out of touch,” which, she added, isn’t surprising coming from a candidate who said “corporations are people.” Romney uttered those famous words when confronted by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement members during the Iowa State Fair. So Dvorsky continues to find at least some of Iowa CCI’s activism useful, even though she has bashed the group’s tactics.

Boswell comes on at about the 3:00 mark in the conference call audio. Here’s the bulk of his remarks (my transcript):

We’re very concerned. You know, we’ve got two clear paths we can follow – we can double down on the same failed economic policies that took us to the brink of almost a second Great Depression, or we can grow our economy by investing in our communities and in middle class families.

We’ve had a lot of discussion these last 300 plus days on the situation with the debt and the deficit. We all know it’s there. Some folks seem to have forgotten how we got there–a little amnesia set in–but, we’re there, and we all know we gotta deal with it. The question is how, and what Mitt Romney is suggesting is not the “how” that I would want to support.

It’s hard to believe, but he follows a pattern of policies that shift the burden to the middle class. And it’s clear to me, where I come from and where I’ve been in my life, it’s the middle class [and] the working families of America that have made this country great. Yes, we need people to be entrepreneurial […] but they’ve gotta remember who gets them there that comes to the workforce: the middle-class families, those that want to have the dream for their children, as I’ve had, and as I want for my children and my grandchildren.

So the proposals that he comes up with, it just is amazing. You know, he would privatize Medicare and slash Social Security. As I described last week, he even proposed privatizing veterans’ health care.

The proposals might help Romney win over conservative Republicans in the caucus-goers, but they’re not going to help our struggling middle class. Leadership means putting our country ahead of politics, but it’s clear that on issue after issue Mitt Romney is choosing to put his own politics ahead of strengthening the middle class and putting people back to work. And that’s what’ll get our economy going, to get people back to work.

Boswell is facing a tough re-election campaign against nine-term Republican Tom Latham in the new third Congressional district. Boswell has criticized Latham’s position on taxes, Medicare and Social Security many times. It looks like he is banking on Romney to win the GOP nomination and is prepared to run against Romney as well. Boswell’s 2010 challenger, Brad Zaun, tried to link Boswell to unpopular policies of President Barack Obama, and I expect Latham and his allies to do the same next year. Karl Rove’s conservative group Crossroads has already placed two rounds of tv ads against Boswell this year, highlighting Boswell’s stand on the deficit and taxes and portraying Boswell and Obama as “two peas in a pod.”

Latham hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate yet. In keeping with his low-profile style, he has been almost invisible during the Iowa caucus campaign. I haven’t heard him comment on Romney’s specific tax proposals, but Latham does stick to the House Republican orthodoxy regarding tax cuts for the wealthy.

Share any relevant thoughts in this thread.