A lot of folks are mad at Barack Obama for an ad and some remarks that suggest that Mitt Romney would not have killed Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, there's something to the claim…some quotes that suggest that Romney didn't think it was such a priority. Neither, a month or two after 9/11, did George W. Bush as I recall.
On the other hand, who knows what some people will do, given the opportunity? One of the Romney quotes offered in evidence that he would have let the guy go is one that says he didn't think it would be cost-effective to spend all that money to hunt down one man. I can imagine a set of numbers where even the most fervent Anti-Terrorist would have figured this country could have put the cash to better use. Maybe if someone had said to Romney, "Hey, we know where the guy is and Seal Team 6 says they can take him out for a hundred bucks," Romney would have said, "At that price, I'll go for it!"
Then again, Republicans do like to paint Democrats as weak on taking bold action and being harsh on this nation's enemies. There are those in the G.O.P. who still advance that argument and if you mention Killing Osama to them, they shrug their shoulders, say something like "Oh, that doesn't count" and pretend it never happened.
I do think that if a Republican President had presided over the killing, we would never hear the end of it. It would be hailed as the most courageous, pro-American macho thing a Chief Exec had ever done…like he'd single-handedly won World War III, and he should not only be re-elected but anyone who'd vote against him was guilty of treason. That kind of thing.
Remember all those rumors a few months before the 2004 election that bin Laden was dead and that the Bush Admininstration had his body in a big refrigerator? They were all ready to pull it out, defrost him and produce his corpse a week before we voted…or so some believed. I wonder if anyone in the current White House, just before the hit on Osama, thought about that; not about putting the guy on ice but about the timing. It had to have crossed somebody's mind to think, "Hey, bin Laden isn't going anyplace…we could wait until it's closer to Election Day to kill him."