Is Obama wrong to use bin Laden's death to attack Romney?

The president's campaign creates a stir by suggesting Mitt would not have ordered the mission to kill the 9/11 mastermind

President Obama applauds the CIA for their work tracking down Osama bin Laden: A new campaign video reminds voters just who ordered the killing of Public Enemy No. 1.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

President Obama is not going to let voters forget his most spectacular foreign policy success: The killing of Osama bin Laden. And in a new campaign video, Team Obama suggests that Republican Mitt Romney would not have ordered the raid. (See the video below.) After Bill Clinton is featured praising Obama for his strength and decisiveness, the video needles in by asking, "What path would Mitt Romney have taken?" The clip also features Romney's criticisms of Obama's vow to strike al Qaeda targets within Pakistan, and Romney's years-old assertion that "it's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person." Vice President Joe Biden is also hammering Romney on the campaign trail, saying that while Obama has a "backbone like a ramrod," no one can "say for certain" how Romney would have acted. Is Obama wrong to use bin Laden's death as a "political cudgel"?

Yes. Obama should be ashamed: This video is "shameless," says Morgen Richmond at Hot Air. The Obama campaign even stooped to releasing it on the "one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death for maximum political effect." If Obama had any class, he would follow the example of the U.S. commandoes who fulfilled the mission, "and let his actions speak for themselves."

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