Mitt Romney’s campaign released a new television ad Tuesday doubling down on the candidate’s charge during the foreign-policy debate that President Obama had conducted an “apology tour.”
“The president began with an apology tour of going to various nations and criticizing America,” Romney says as the ad begins. “I think they looked at that and saw weakness.”
The ad then plays footage from Monday night, when Romney repeated the charge, one he has leveled frequently on the campaign trail.
“The reason I call it an apology tour — you went to the Middle East and you flew to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia and to Turkey and to Iraq, and you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the region,” says Romney in the debate clip. “You said that America had dictated to other nations. Mr. President, the U.S. has not dictated to other nations; we have freed other nations from dictators.”
During Romney’s dialogue, text from the ad reads, “As president, Barack Obama has yet to visit Israel.”
At the debate, the president was prepared for the Romney attack, and one of his stronger moments came in his response to that very exchange.
“This has been probably the biggest whopper that's been told during the course of this campaign,” Obama said.
"If we're going to talk about trips that we've taken," he continued, "when I was a candidate for office, the first trip I took was to visit our troops. And when I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn’t take donors. I didn’t attend fundraisers ... I went to ... the Holocaust museum there to remind myself of the nature of evil and why our bond with Israel will be unbreakable.”
The Obama campaign dismissed the new ad as recycling a "false attack."
“After losing the foreign policy debate because of his unclear, uncertain and unsteady performance on some of the nation's most pressing foreign policy challenges, Mitt Romney is going back to the well – the old standby false attack alleging that the President apologized for America," said Obama campaign spokesman Danny Kanner, in a statement on Tuesday.
"It wasn't true last night just as it wasn't true throughout the course of this campaign – in fact, fact checkers continue to call it a blatant falsehood. With this new ad, Mitt Romney once again proved there is nothing he won't say to get elected. But, voters should beware – his reckless and wrong foreign policies would take America back to a more dangerous time and reduce our standing in the world,” Kanner added
