MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — Republican Mitt Romney today jumped into the fracas between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, comparing Mr. Obama to Neville Chamberlain, the British leader known for his policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany. He also denounced Senator Clinton’s domestic policy positions.
On the Clinton-Obama duel, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have issued caustic criticisms of the other’s differing responses during Monday night’s Democratic debate on the question of whether they’d be willing to meet with leaders of rogue nations. While Mr. Obama said he would be willing, Mrs. Clinton essentially said she wouldn’t without lower-level vetting to avoid propaganda issues. Afterward, Senator Clinton called Mr. Obama’s remarks “irresponsible and frankly naïve,” while Mr. Obama fired back yesterday, using the same terms to characterize her war vote in 2002.
Weighing in today during the first of a series of “Ask Mitt Anything” forums in Iowa, Mr. Romney declared Mrs. Clinton’s answer to be the right one. Diverging from his usual stump speech, he spent the first 10 minutes of his remarks attacking the Democratic presidential hopefuls and singling out Mr. Obama for excoriation.
Mr. Romney told his audience of about a hundred people that Mr. Obama “told us his agenda for the people he’d be visiting his first year: Ahmadinejad, Chavez; he’d be going to Syria, meeting with the president of Syria,” referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, and Hugo Chavez, the leader of Venezuela.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/romney-attacks-obama-clinton/