Romney Opts Not to Attack on Libya
BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Moderator Bob Schieffer wasted no time Monday night trying to get Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to address the controversy that has engulfed the campaign since the killing of four Americans -- including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens -- at a U.S. compound in Benghazi on Sept. 11.
“The first question, and it concerns Libya,” Schieffer said as the third and final presidential debate began. “What happened? What caused it? Was it spontaneous? Was it an intelligence failure? Was it a policy failure? Was there an attempt to mislead people about what really happened?”
Having won a coin toss prior to the debate, Romney had the opportunity to respond first on an issue Republicans have been eager for another chance to address since last Tuesday’s face-off at Hofstra University.
Instead, the GOP nominee ignored the line of inquiry and pivoted to other topics.
Choosing not to answer any of Schieffer’s six specific questions, Romney delved into a broader discourse on “the environment in the Middle East,” including the hope for “more moderation and opportunity for greater participation on the part of women in public life” and also referencing the civil war in Syria.
Only then did the former Massachusetts governor mention the dynamic in Libya, and only briefly.
“We see in Libya an attack apparently by, I think we know now, by terrorists of some kind against our people there -- four people dead,” Romney said. “Our hearts and minds go out to them.”
Pointedly, he declined to criticize the administration’s handling of the issue.
Campaign Moods Shift as Contest Tightens
Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times
At a campaign event in Canton, Ohio, a supporter of President Obama listened to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Published: October 22, 2012
BOCA RATON, Fla. — With a last aggressive debate performance behind him and 14 grueling days ahead, President Obama is now facing what he worked so hard to avoid: a neck-and-neck race with a challenger gaining ground when it matters most.
Over the last month, through the debates and a gradual moderation of the conservative tone he struck during the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney undermined the Democrats’ expensive summertime work of casting him as the candidate of and for the rich, emerging as a far more formidable opponent than Mr. Obama had ever expected.
He continued down the path of moderation here on Monday night, agreeing with Mr. Obama almost as often as he disagreed.
“For the first time in this race, I’d rather be us than them,” said Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, crediting Mr. Romney’s strength in the first debate as a critical shift in the campaign. “They spent months building him up as one thing and one night he disproved it.”
The president, aware of deepening worry among Democrats about the prospect of losing the White House, was aggressive at the debate, belittling his rival’s foreign policy experience in a bid to keep voters from seeing him as a credible commander in chief.
Romney Rising?
Obama won the debate, but the Republican nominee seems to think he is winning the war.
Romney didn't need to thrive on foreign policy. Survival was enough.
Photo by EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images
Mitt Romney brought a knife to a gunfight. A butter knife. In the third and final presidential debate, focused on national security and foreign policy, the Republican challenger seemed to be living by the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. In this case that meant a mostly passive, heavy-on-agreement discussion with his opponent the commander in chief. President Obama, by contrast, was on the attack, repeatedly calling Romney reckless and looking every bit like the politician who thinks he's behind in the race.
President Obama won the third debate, articulating his policies more forcefully, offering more detail and a coherent foreign policy rationale. Romney generally presented bromides and talking points in a style that was at times tentative. When he talked about foreign policy, Romney occasionally sounded like a student trying to prove that he'd crammed for the test, rattling off the names of countries and bullet points he'd recently committed to memory. In the end though, the political question is not who won the policy debate on foreign policy, but whether Romney cleared the bar as a plausible commander in chief. Voters are going to hire him based on his ability to handle the economy, which means he does not need to be as competent on a secondary issue like foreign policy. He just has to be acceptable.
What does acceptable mean? For Romney, it probably meant no mistakes (and there were no obvious gaffes). The country will now return to talking about the economy, the issue he wants to talk about.
The immediate exit polls were mixed. CBS polled undecided voters and they gave the night to Obama, 53 percent to 23 percent. CNN's poll of registered voters gave the narrow edge to Obama, 48 percent to 40 percent. While Obama called Romney reckless several times, there was nothing the former Massachusetts governor did or said that seemed reckless. After the first debate, Romney campaign strategists said that voters might not have followed the specifics of Romney’s plans but liked that he had them. In the third debate, Romney was hoping that his vague but confident pronouncements would do nothing to frighten undecided voters, even if it did cost him the Council on Foreign Relations crowd. And he took no risks by mounting a serious and sustained challenge of the president. In the CBS poll, 49 percent said Romney could be trusted in an international crisis. That was only a few points above what people thought going in to the debate. If he’s clearing the acceptability bar, that number suggests it’s not by much.
read more at http://www.slate.com
By Kristin Jensen and John McCormick - Oct 22, 2012 10:00 PM MT
President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney accused each other of failing to have clear foreign policy visions as the two met last night for their third and final debate.
“I know you haven’t been in a position to actually execute foreign policy, but every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong,” Obama, 51, said at the faceoff in Boca Raton, Florida. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has put forth strategies that are “all over the map,” Obama said.
Romney, 65, began the debate by criticizing Obama for what he described as growing threats in Syria, Libya, Mali, Egypt andIran. While he congratulated Obama for the raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, he said, “we must have a comprehensive strategy” to reject extremism.
“We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” Romney said, and “disturbing events” in the Middle East represent “a pretty dramatic reversal in the kinds of hopes we had for that region.”
Obama stressed his commander-in-chief credentials while trying to paint Romney as out of his depth. The president told Romney that a complaint he frequently makes on the campaign trail about lower U.S. navy ship levels was misplaced because the military has changed.
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