The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

Around midnight, I saw a statement that had been put out by Mitt Romney: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn the attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” I stood in my bedroom processing the words as waves of anger washed over me. For a moment, I couldn’t even understand which statement Romney meant; then I realized that he was referring to the statement that the embassy in Cairo put out earlier in the day, before anything had happened in Benghazi. I had grown accustomed to ugly Republican attacks, but this felt different. Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege. They were ignoring the fact that the video was offensive. They were making it harder for us to say things that could help protect American lives abroad. They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism.