Obama drops the Dick Cheney-George Bush bomb on Romney

Mitt Romney keeps trying to swerve off the foreign policy debate road and wrench this debate back onto the issue that he thinks will win him the election: The economy. The national debt, Romney said, “is our greatest national security threat” Mitt said.

Romney said, to lead internationally, you have to be strong economically at home. “Unfortunately, is nowhere in the world is America’s influence better than it was four years ago.”

Then Romney dropped the stone-cold, often-proven-wrong lie that Obama said that he promised unemployment would be at 5.4 percent. No. Obama never said that.

Obama countered that “our alliances have never been stronger in Asia, Europe, Africa” and even, yes, Israel, which has been a valuable intelligence partner.

Uh, Israel might be a stretch.

Then Obama dropped what everyone knew was coming: Tying Romney to the Bush-Cheney years, noting that Mitt has praised both of them.

And yes, Romney did say during a September campaign stop that Cheney was “a man of wisdom and judgment, and he could have been president of the United States.”

Twice, moderator Bob Schieffer said that we’ve got to get this conversation back onto foreign policy. Good luck with that.

Joe Garofoli