“More troubling,” Romney said, was that the day after the attack, “the president flew to Las Vegas for a political fundraiser,” and then to Colorado for another fundraiser, when he should have been dealing with the crisis.
You could practically hear trumpets blaring “Hail to the Chief” at the vast opening that this left the president. Obama, with a stern face and a barely suppressed tone of outrage, stated that the day after the attack, he stood in the Rose Garden and denounced the assault as “an act of terror.” A few days later, he added, he greeted the caskets of the dead, grieved with their families. To say that anybody on his team “would play politics” on an issue like this, Obama concluded, “is offensive—that’s not what we do.”
Romney then dug himself deeper, claiming that Obama took 14 days before he called the attack an act of terror. Obama replied, “Look at the transcript.” Then, in a peak of drama, Candy Crowley, the CNN reporter who moderated the debate, interjected, “He did, in fact, sir,” prompting applause from the otherwise-stone-faced audience. In other words, Crowley said, Obama did call it an act of terror.
Let’s go to that
press conference of Sept. 12. Obama did say, clearly speaking about the attack the day before, “No acts of terror will shake the resolve of this great nation.”
