US News

Mitt Romney attacks Obama’s foreign policy during campaign rally

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney yesterday called out President Obama for soft-pedaling deadly chaos in the Middle East as merely “bumps in the road.”

“Bumps in the road? We had an ambassador assassinated,” Romney declared at a Colorado rally with about 2,000 supporters.

“These are not bumps in the road. These are human lives,” he said. “These are not developments we want to see. This is time for a president who will shape events in the Middle East, not just be . . . at the mercy of the events in the Middle East.”

Romney adopted a more forceful tone to assail Obama’s foreign policy — a harbinger of the more aggressive campaign planned as he embarks today on a two-day bus tour through the battleground of Ohio.

Obama leads Romney, by 51 to 46 percent, among likely voters in the must-win Buckeye State, according to a Cincinnati Enquirer/Ohio Newspaper Organization poll.

Romney trails in most of the swing states that will decide the race, and he’s kicking his campaign into overdrive.

The pivot to foreign policy followed Obama’s remarks in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” in which the president called the Middle East turmoil “bumps in the road.”

Romney cited the terrorist attack in Libya that killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, violent anti-American demonstrations throughout the region, unchecked bloodshed in Syria and strained US relations with Israel.

In the TV interview, Obama said backing the Arab Spring revolutions that preceded the recent turmoil was “absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy.”

“But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road,” Obama said. “In a lot of these places, the one organizing principle has been Islam . . . There are strains of extremism and anti- Americanism and anti-Western sentiments.”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that criticizing Obama’s “bumps in the road” remark, and linking it to the death of Stevens, was “both desperate and offensive.”

“The president was referring to the transformations in the region,” Carney said. “There is a certain, rather desperate, attempt to grasp at words and phrases here to find political advantage, and in this case, that’s profoundly offensive.”

Romney also hammered Obama on foreign policy in a series of hastily arranged network TV news interviews.

He told NBC News that it is “time for America to exert leadership and this is not something that we are doing in the Middle East.”

It was part of a new strategy that Romney has adopted to regain momentum and erase Obama’s persistent lead in swing state polls.