Source: NYT
By DAVID E. SANGER and ASHLEY PARKER
Published: September 12, 2012
WASHINGTON — To Mitt Romney, it seemed like an opportunity to draw a stark contrast: Protests were erupting in Cairo and Benghazi, Libya, apparently over an anti-Islamic video, the White House was in a nasty spat with the Israelis, and administration officials in Cairo had put out a statement urging religious tolerance. From the perspective of the Republican’s campaign, the time was ripe to cast President Obama again as someone apologizing for America who abandoned longtime allies and failed to defend American interests.
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But by Wednesday morning, as the sequence of events and the scope of the tragedy in Benghazi became more clear, Mr. Romney’s initial statement and ensuing comments were coming under attack as clumsy at best. By later in the day, even some Republican allies were declining to follow his lead, and some acknowledged that he looked as if he was trying to score points in the middle of a crisis.
For a country looking to understand how Mr. Romney, a Republican candidate with no foreign policy experience, would respond to a major crisis, this was a first glimpse. And as an adviser to the campaign who worked in the George W. Bush administration said on Wednesday, Mr. Romney’s accusation that Mr. Obama had invited the attacks because he had weakened America looked like “he had forgotten the first rule in a crisis: don’t start talking before you understand what’s happening.”
The statement that seemed to backfire on Mr. Romney was a team effort, his aides said, written by a group of aides who focus on policy, another that focuses on political strategy and another on communications. Mr. Romney himself signed off on it, they said. In fact, the Cairo statement he was linking to the violence — issued by the embassy, where the ambassador, Anne Patterson, is a career Foreign Service officer who was a favorite of President Bush when she was ambassador to Pakistan — was issued around 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday in Cairo, before any attacks had happened.
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Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/us/politics/behind-romneys-decision-to-criticize-obama-on-libya.html?pagewanted=all
