BOCA RATON, Fla. — A pugnacious President Obama cast Mitt Romney on Monday night as a defense and foreign policy amateur, accusing him of naiveté and shifting positions that would undermine the country's well-being at home and its security abroad.
"The problem is … on a whole range of issues," Obama said in one biting exchange, "you've been all over the map."
Romney took a more temperate tone but nevertheless accused the president of repeatedly apologizing for the country abroad — something the president vigorously denied — and failing to stand up for its ideals, especially during the revolutionary "Arab Spring."
"We have to stand by our principles," Romney said. "… But unfortunately, nowhere in the world is America's influence greater today than it was four years ago."
The third and final presidential debate focused largely on defense and foreign policy issues, with the two rivals painting vastly different pictures of the world: safer and tighter-knit, Obama suggested; dangerous and more threatening, Romney said.
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But on many issues, including Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and the use of predator drones — which both men endorsed — the two were often largely in agreement, despite their sometimes heated rhetoric.
Most of their sharpest exchanges involved domestic policy, with the two restating many of the positions they took in their first two debates.
Obama accused Romney of favoring across-the-board tax cuts that would help the wealthy at the expense of the the middle class while plunging the country even deeper into debt. Romney cited his decades working in private business, rescuing the scandal-plagued 2002 Winter Olympics and governing Massachusetts, saying in every instance he managed to keep the books in balance and would do so again as president.
The two sat side by side at a wooden table facing the moderator, CBS' Bob Schieffer, who kept a much tighter rein on the two men than in their previous town-hall-style encounter.
Even so, the president was on the attack much of evening, alternately dismissive and sarcastic toward his Republican rival.
At one point, when Romney criticized threatened defense cuts and called for building more Navy ships and bulking up the Air Force, Obama suggested his rival "maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works."
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"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets … because the nature of our military's changed," the president taunted. "We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."
The two candidates repeatedly pivoted from foreign to domestic issues.
Romney said America's role is to "make the world more peaceful," and that to do so, "America must be strong. America must lead."
"For that to happen, we have to strengthen our economy here at home. You can't have 23 million people struggling to get a job. You can't have an economy that over the last three years keeps slowing down its growth rate," he said.
Obama answered that because he presided over an end to the war in Iraq, began a transition out of Afghanistan and strengthened alliances with partners abroad, the nation is in a position to "start rebuilding America."
Romney's approach was the wrong one both home and abroad, Obama added, tying him to what the president said was the previous administration's promotion of "wrong and reckless policies."
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