When Democrats say stuff like this, the Romney campaign complains that they’re dividing the country:
“Thanks to President Obama, bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” [Joe] Biden continued. “You have to ask yourself had Governor Romney been president, could he have used the same slogan in reverse?”
The administration is hitting Romney on multiple fronts. In addition to the vice president’s remark, we have Leon Panetta releasing a copy of his notes on the president’s order to get bin-Laden, a major article in Time about the raid, and a new video produced by Bill Clinton:
In a new web advertisement, President Bill Clinton says that Obama chose the “more honorable path” by ordering the 2011 attack that resulted in the death of bin Laden.
“Look, he knew what would happen,” Clinton explains. “Suppose the Navy Seals had gone in there and it hadn’t been bin Laden. Suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him, but he reasoned I cannot in good conscience do nothing.”
The ad goes on to ask if Romney would have made the same decision.
Now, let me ask you, do you think Karl Rove would have used the death of bin-Laden as a political weapon if his boss had actually been concerned enough about him to find him and kill him?
It might be seen as a cynical political ploy, except that Romney is on the record as saying, “it’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
That suggests that Romney never would have made capturing bin-Laden the intelligence community’s top priority, as Obama did.
On June 2, 2009, just over four months into his presidency, Obama had signed a memo to CIA Director Leon Panetta stating “in order to ensure that we have expanded every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice” bin Laden.
Would Romney have made the same ballsy call that Obama made? He never would have had the chance, because finding and killing bin-Laden weren’t things Romney wanted to devote resources to. He never would have found him in the first place.
So, this attack is fair.
