President Obama’s re-election team on Sunday claimed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lacked the grit to order the killing of Osama bin Laden, in a particularly aggressive attack drawing Republican scorn around the anniversary of the al Qaeda leader’s death.
Asked whether Romney would have approved the same clandestine raid Obama ordered a year ago, when he dispatched a Navy SEALs team to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs said, “I don’t think it’s clear that he would.”
“Look, just a few years ago, President Obama — then a candidate — said in a speech that if we had actionable intelligence of a high-value target in Pakistan, we’d go in and get that high-value target,” Gibbs said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Mitt Romney said that was foolish. He wouldn’t do such a thing. That he wouldn’t move heaven and earth to get Osama bin Laden.”
The salvo at Romney echoed earlier claims by Obama’s surrogates and indicates the president doesn’t just intend to use the killing of bin Laden to establish his own national security credentials but to question the readiness of Romney to be the nation’s commander in chief.
It was the same kind of attack on Romney that Vice President Biden first voiced last week and about which the Obama campaign launched a Web video.
The campaign video features former President Clinton crediting Obama for taking the “harder and the more honorable path” in killing bin Laden. “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?” the video asks.
The Romney campaign countered Sunday that such assertions reflect the desperation of a president facing a tough re-election slog amid stubbornly slow economic recovery.
“This is one of the reasons President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history,” said Romney adviser Ed Gillespie. “He took something that was a unifying event for all Americans … and he’s managed to turn it into a divisive partisan political attack.”
In questioning Romney’s ability to deal with a national security crisis, Obama is flipping the very kind of attacks launched against him four years ago. In the 2008 Democratic primary, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton unleashed an ad questioning whether Obama had what it took to respond to a “3 a.m. phone call.” At the time, the Obama camp accused Clinton of employing the “politics of fear.”
Rebutting Republican criticism, Obama’s campaign said that if the mission to get bin Laden had failed, Romney certainly would have used that against the president in the fall campaign. Besides, aides said, they’re merely highlighting an achievement that is part of Obama’s first-term record.
Obama will weigh in on the killing of bin Laden later this week in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams in which the president is expected to talk about the anxiety of watching and waiting while SEAL Team Six completed the raid on bin Laden’s compound.
However, even some Democrats say Obama is overplaying his hand on bin Laden’s death.
“I’d advise them to rein it in a bit,” said one Democratic strategist not connected to the Obama campaign. “He doesn’t need to attack Romney — just highlight the accomplishment — because it throws politics into an issue on which everyone gives him credit. There’s no point in screwing that up.”
