WASHINGTON — The killing of Osama bin Laden, first presented as a moment of national unity by President Barack Obama, has become something else: a political weapon.
Obama’s re-election campaign is portraying his risky decision to go after America’s top enemy as a defining difference with his Republican presidential opponent, suggesting Mitt Romney might not have had the guts to order a mission that put lives and perhaps a presidency at stake.
Obama himself is opening up on the raid again — and opening the secretive White House Situation Room as an interview stage — to hail the one-year anniversary.
The broader goal for Obama, whether through campaign Web videos or the trappings of the White House, is not to just to remind voters of an enormous victory on his watch. It is to maximize a political narrative that he has the courage to make tough calls that his opponent might not.
“Does anybody doubt that had the mission failed, it would have written the beginning of the end of the president’s first term?” Vice President Joe Biden said in laying out Obama’s foreign policy campaign message. “We know what President Obama did. We can’t say for certain what Governor Romney would have done.”
Biden even combined the killing of the al-Qaeda leader and Obama’s support for a failing auto industry into what he called a re-election bumper sticker message.
“It’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” Biden said in a speech Thursday.
Obama’s campaign followed that Friday with a Web video questioning whether Romney would have taken the same path Obama did. If features a quote from a 2007 Romney interview in which he said it was not worth “moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
That prompted Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, to issue a scathing statement in which he accused Obama of playing politics with the bin Laden killing and “diminishing the memory of September 11th.”
“This is the same president who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn’t ‘spike the ball’ after the touchdown,” he said. “And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get re-elected.”
“It’s now sad to see the Obama campaign seek to use an event that unified our country to once again divide us, in order to distract voters’ attention from the failures of his administration,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt declined comment for this story, saying Biden’s speech and the new campaign video speak for themselves.
