Osama bin Laden is dead and gone but his demise was trotted out Friday as a campaign issue by President Barack Obama, whose new ad questions whether his Republican rival would have ordered such a risky military raid.
The video features ex-president Bill Clinton hailing Obama for a brave call to take out the Al-Qaeda leader in a Navy SEALs operation one year ago.
White House challenger Mitt Romney, in turn, rapped the Democrats for politicizing the raid in the run-up to its May 2 anniversary, with surrogates saying it was "unbecoming" of Obama to reduce the historic moment to a campaign slogan.
"He had to decide. And that's what you hire a president to do. You hire the president to make the calls when no one else can do it," Clinton said in the 90-second video, which sought to contrast Obama with the presumptive Republican nominee.
Entitled "One Chance," the ad uses images of Obama and his cabinet in the White House Situation Rooom, and news footage including quotes from Romney during his 2008 failed presidential bid in which the former Massachusetts governor appeared ambivalent about going after the elusive bin Laden.
Clinton saluted Obama for greenlighting the clandestine raid in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad despite knowing that the consequences would be disastrous if it went wrong.
"Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there, and it hadn't been bin Laden," Clinton said.
"Suppose they'd been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him.
"But he reasoned, 'I cannot in good conscience do nothing.' He took the harder and the more honorable path, and the one that produced, in my opinion, the best result."
Last year's raid outraged the Pakistani government and Islamabad's powerful military, who Washington chose to keep in the dark throughout.
The operation plunged US-Pakistani ties to an all-time low but it was seen as a huge strategic and popular success for Obama given the decade-long hunt for the terror mastermind.
The ad's on-screen text asks: "Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?" and features a screen grab highlighting Romney's doubts about the merits of searching for bin Laden.
"It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney was quoted as saying in a news report shown on CNN from when he was a Republican candidate four years ago.
Vice President Joe Biden had seized on the same remarks Thursday in a foreign policy speech.
He said Obama has a "ramrod" backbone, while Romney showed "profound misunderstanding" of presidential responsibility.
"If you're looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it's pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive," Biden said.
The White House was pushing the narrative in another event Thursday, when Obama gave a US network an extraordinarily rare interview in the Situation Room and discussed the key moments in the dramatic run-up to bin Laden's demise.
Romney's campaign argued that while Romney congratulated the president and military on that day last year, a "desperate" Obama was seizing on the achievement to distract voters "from the failures of his administration."
"Killing Osama bin Laden was a momentous day for all Americans and we all give the president credit," former defense secretary Frank Carlucci and former navy secretary John Lehman, who both served under president Ronald Reagan, said in a Romney campaign statement.
"But we are saddened to see the president of the United States politicize that event, even reducing it to a campaign slogan. This is unbecoming of the commander-in-chief."
Romney's campaign attacked Obama's "remarkably flailing" reelection bid, saying the president is refusing to run on his record.
"The Obama campaign is like one of those gyrating, intermittent lawn sprinklers, spewing out attacks in seemingly random directions, hoping... to talk about anything but the unemployment rate, federal debt, gas prices, or rising health insurance premiums," campaign manager Matt Rhoades said.
Source: AFP American Edition
