Mitt Romney's campaign is out with a new ad targeting Barack Obama one day after the final presidential debate of the election season.
"The president began with an apology tour, of going to various nations and criticizing America," Romney says in footage of Monday night's debate featured in the spot. "I think they looked at that and saw weakness."
The spot, perhaps not surprisingly, is titled "Apology Tour."
HuffPost's Sam Stein reports on the exchange highlighted in the spot from Monday night's debate:
An exchange on diplomacy with Iran allowed President Barack Obama to rebut one of the most oft-repeated attack lines of the campaign: that he somehow went on an apology tour upon entering office.
"Nothing Governor Romney just said is true," he declared. "Starting with this notion of me apologizing. This has probably been the biggest whopper told during this campaign."
Romney had brought the so-called "apology tour" up earlier as a means of arguing that the president had allowed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an opening to pursue nuclear weapon technology while Obama tried to jumpstart high-level diplomatic negotiations. And after Obama finished his response, Romney explained, in more detail, exactly what he meant.
"The reason I call it an apology tour is because you went to the Middle East [upon taking office] ... and by the way, they noticed that you skipped Israel ... You said that America had been dismissive and derisive," he said. "You said on occasion Americans had dictated to other nations."
Obama had clearly been coached that the charge would be leveled and he was ready with a response.
"If we are going to talk about trips we have taken.... when I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn't take donors. I didn't take fundraisers," he said, in reference to the trip Romney took over the summer. "I went to Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial museum] ... and then I went down to the border towns ... which had experienced missiles raining down from Hamas."
"That is how I've used my travels, when I traveled to Israel and when I traveled to the region," Obama went on. "And the central question at this point is, who is going to be credible to all parties involved? And they can look at my record ... and they can say the president of the United States and the United States of America has stood on the right side of history."
Click here for a full recap of the final presidential debate of the election season. Below, pictures from the event.
