Amid an ongoing brawl that erupted today with Rudy Giuliani over fiscal policy, Mitt Romney has just gone up on the air today in New Hampshire with an ad attacking Republicans that will also go up in Iowa in a few days:

In the ad, Romney lambastes the Republican Party, saying that if GOPers want to win the White House, Republicans need to "put our own house in order." The backstory here is that Rudy went out there earlier today and did the same thing, bashing the GOP in similar terms. That prompted Romney spokesman Kevin Madden to slam Rudy today, pointing out that this has been Romney's mantra for some time: "Where did we hear this first? Oh, that's right…thanks for agreeing with Governor Romney's message!"

The broader context here is that a battle over fiscal policy erupted today between Mitt and Rudy. Mitt is arguing that Rudy is a tax-hiker, pointing to his embrace of the commuter tax as New York Mayor. Rudy is responding by blasting Mitt's fiscal record as governor of Massachusetts.

As Jonathan Martin notes, Romney's imperative here is to get Rudy to stop spending all his time attacking Hillary, which has earned him huge amounts of attention from a gullible media, and drag him into a battle with, you know, a GOP primary opponent. Interestingly, the battle is forcing each GOP candidate to compete in his denunciations of the GOP's spending -- the subtext being that each one is battling to prove that he's the candidate who understands why the Republicans have been losing lately and hence is the one best prepared to reverse that trend.