The Romney campaign released a new television ad Tuesday escalating the governor’s charge during the foreign-policy debate that President Obama had conducted an “apology tour" when first taking office.
“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 the debate when Romney repeated the charge on the president’s foreign policy.
“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.”
Obama hit back saying, “This has been probably the biggest whopper that's been told during the course of this campaign.”
"If we're going to talk about trips that we've taken," he said, "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.” That trip, however, was before Obama's election and the negative incidents that gave rise to Israelis overwhelming lack of support for Obama.
The Obama campaign dismissed the new ad as recycling a "false attack."