Presidential Duties Versus Campaign Strategy: The Real Reason President Obama Isn’t Meeting With World Leaders
What’s the real reason President Obama isn’t meeting privately with world leaders as they gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly? Recent attacks during the election season may hold the answer. At a recent campaign stop, Mitt Romney lambasted Barack Obama for describing challenges during his presidency as “bumps in the road.” Romney said, “We had an ambassador assassinated, we had a Muslim Brotherhood member elected to the presidency of Egypt. […] These are not bumps in the road, these are human lives, these are developments we don’t not want to see.”
On Your World, Chief White House correspondent Ed Henry surmised that in the midst of a political campaign, President Obama doesn’t want
his words to be used against him. Henry said, say for instance, “The Libyan president who’s in town talking about the investigation and what really went down in Benghazi, which the administration has given several different versions of what happened, that sort of leads to unforced errors, […] he doesn’t want to take any chances.”
