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"\n\nVisit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy\n\n As the sun sets this evening, telephones across the swing states will begin to jingle with calls from Romney's pollsters, seeking instant reaction to the candidate's decision, last night and today, to make the attacks in Libya and Egypt a political issue. (Poll-testing responses, message points, and arguments at every key juncture is what monied campaigns do these days.) For all we know, the Romney team will get the answers it wants\u2014a statistically significant number of phone respondents may say, yes, Romney was right to jump on the Obama administration for an alleged apology to the mob in Cairo, and that yes, they should put that message in a television ad. Too late: the moment for which Romney needed to be prepared, to nail the posture of leadership and comfort, has already passed.\n\nIf you weren't watching TV this morning, take a few minutes to watch Romney's press conference in Jacksonville, above. The nominee, with the wear of the campaign showing under his eyes, seemed to ramble through his own critique of the president, especially during the hostile question-and-answer period. He failed to articulate crisply how his administration would have responded differently, or to answer the question of why a statement the White House says it didn't approve\u2014and written by far-flung embassy staffers who saw their walls about to be scaled by maniacs\u2014should be held up as the essential document of Obama's foreign policy. The basic answer seems clear enough, though. The Romney campaign saw what it thought was a good opportunity to criticize Obama, and they did what my bosses in politics always warned me never to do: leap without looking. Once it came to light, hours later, that the American ambassador to Libya had been murdered and the situation was way more complicated than a single press release, it was too late for Romney clamber back on message.\n\nAlready, television commentators have taken to cable news to identify this as Romney's \"Lehman moment\"\u2014referring to the bank collapse and market dive exactly four years ago that showed John McCain as wavering and uncertain during the kind of crisis that presidents are supposed to master. There are certainly some similarities. Witness Romney's answer this morning to Jan Crawford of CBS News, when she asked \"What did the White House do wrong, then, Governor Romney, if they put out a statement saying they disagreed with [the Cairo embassy's statement]?\" Normally I'd omit the uhs and repetitions from a direct quote, but in this case they seem illustrative. Here's Romney:\n\n\"Their administration, their administration uh, spoke. The president takes responsibility not just for the words that come from his mouth, but also for the words that come from his ambassadors, from his administration, from his embassies, from his State Department. They clearly, they clearly sent mid messages to the world, and uh, and the statement that came from the administration, and the embassy is the administration, the statement that came from the administration, uh, was, uh, was a statement, uh, which is akin to apology and I think was a, a uh, I think was a severe miscalculation.\"\n\n You could go on about how this line of attack is circular (moments earlier, Romney had said that he and the White House had had \"the exact same reaction\" to the Cairo statement), and why this is precisely the wrong tone for a presidential aspirant to take\u2014mentioning \"ambassadors\" with anything other than praise and gratitude after one has just died in the line of duty. But you get the point. Sufficient that, un-muting Fox News this afternoon, I heard conservative radio talker Monica Crowley say the words: \"what Governor Romney was trying to say...\"\n\nEarlier this summer, when I asked a Romney advisor about the governor's lack of mass appeal, he responded, \"If Romney's so bad, why's he beating Barack Obama?\" Polls now show that he isn't\u2014and it's beginning to be clear why that is. For all the discontentment about the sour economy, it's still on Romney to demonstrate that he'd be a more competent alternative to Barack Obama, and, just as important, the kind of guy you want to see in front of the cameras when something terrible happens. Today, and to date, he's failed that test.\n\n Read more on Death Race 2012\n\nIs It 2020 Yet? George P. Bush Tries To Fire Up Young Voters\n\nIs It 2016 Yet? GQ Checks Out the Democrats Already In the Running\n\n\"He Cleaned Half the Sh*t Up in Four Years\": Snoop Endorses\n\n Today's Political Firestorm: Something Bush Did Eleven Years Ago Still Matters\n\nFollow Reid Cherlin on Twitter for more updates from the campaign trail."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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