“This was news-cycle campaigning by the Romney campaign gone awry. Why didn’t the Romney campaign wait until it had all the facts? On his overseas trip in the summer, Romney was so careful not to criticize Obama while on foreign soil. But how much time do you give an administration to work through a diplomatic and international crisis before trying to score immediate political points? You’d expect the Sarah Palins of the world to quickly pounce on something like this, and she predictably did. But a presidential nominee running for the highest office in the land?”
“After the facts have come out, last night’s Romney statement only feeds the narrative that his campaign is desperate. And given that the Romney camp has already moved on to other subjects this morning — issuing a press release on debt and not the embassy attacks — it appears the campaign realizes it, too. Right before our publication time, the Romney camp responds to us that it stands by its statement from last night.”
Mitt Romney’s “sharply-worded attack on President Obama over a pair of deadly riots in Muslim countries last night has backfired badly among foreign policy hands of both parties, who cast it as hasty and off-key, released before the facts were clear at what has become a moment of tragedy.”
Said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand: “They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up.”
Said another Republican: “I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy. This is just unbelievable — when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it.”
Another said it was “a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.”
Mark Halperin, Holder of All Conventional Wisdom:
Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign.
It’s just remarkable to see Romney unravel like this. Within hours of learning that a respected U.S. ambassador had been killed by a violent mob overseas, the Republican’s first instinct was to launch a partisan campaign attack against the president. It came after a dishonest smear of the president last night — on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when Romney said he’d refrain from such attacks.