The argument the GOP used to undermine John Kerry is now being used against Romney. | REUTERS The Kerry-ization of Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney is getting the full John Kerry treatment on national security — and some top Republicans are alarmed by what they see as his ham-handed response to it.

Romney — whose convention speech didn’t include a salute to the troops or a reference to Afghanistan, where about 75,000 Americans are still at war — is getting hit almost daily now by Democratic attacks that he is wobbly and therefore untrustworthy on national security.


It’s the same critique Republicans used to undermine Kerry to devastating effect eight years ago — and the Obama campaign plans to use the run-up to the presidential debates to make a major issue of Romney’s surprising convention stumble.

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Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, an Obama surrogate, said Monday that the GOP nominee’s approach has been “unbecoming of someone who wants to become commander in chief.” Clark was building on a very personal critique of Romney that started with Kerry himself at last week’s Democratic convention and was quickly followed by Vice President Joe Biden and then President Barack Obama.

Romney, who aides say has downplayed national security in speeches and in the campaign to focus on the economy, will seek to repair any damage on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, when he speaks to a crowd of 4,000 at the annual conference of the National Guard Association in Reno, Nev. What might have been a standard patriotic speech has become a more urgent mission to reset the national security debate for the last nine weeks of the campaign, aides said.

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Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview that he thinks Romney should use his speech Tuesday to “go on the offensive — to point out that the president never mentions victory in Afghanistan, but talks about withdrawal. That has clearly encouraged the Taliban and extremists. The level of violence is up.”

“Of course, I believe that he should have repeated what he has continually said throughout the campaign: how much we appreciate the men and women who serve,” McCain said. “But there is nothing for him to be defensive about.”

Yet Obama advisers tell POLITICO that they expect to cite the convention-speech omission repeatedly in coming days as evidence that Romney is not ready to be commander in chief and is not being frank about what he would do if elected, including his policy on Afghanistan. The campaign plans to use Romney’s omission as a key talking point in events aimed at military families and veterans in Virginia, North Carolina and other swing states where many voters have relatives or neighbors serving in combat.

The Obama team also is beginning to point out that Romney’s address failed to mention Al Qaeda, a staple of the two earlier post-Sept. 11 Republican presidential campaigns. Several top Republicans said that, besides the short-term damage to his own campaign, Romney’s perceived neglect of national security could hurt the party in the long term if he loses because the issue has been a traditional Republican touchstone.

In essence, many of the same Democrats who accused Republicans of playing politics with war in past elections are playing politics with it this time around.

Romney’s oversight might seem minor, a sin of omission for failing to the mention the troops in a speech that’s meant to be sweeping by design. But several GOP strategists told POLITICO they considered it, in the words of one, “felony stupid,” raising “a leadership issue, a spine issue” for Romney.

Some officials close to the Romney campaign said it’s especially exasperating because of advice Romney received from some advisers, both internally and externally, to visit Afghanistan and talk to commanders during his foreign swing that began at the Olympics. “Obama is the master of details, and he will try to destroy Mitt on this in debates,” one hawkish Republican said.

Chris LaCivita, a Republican consultant who was an adviser to the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, said: “You’re not just running for president — you’re running for commander in chief. What he needs to do now is show members of the military, their families and voters in general that he is capable of leading the country on issues other than the ones he is most comfortable talking about.”

Romney squandered earlier opportunities to repair the damage in national television interviews, and some influential Republicans fear he is beginning to look like Kerry, circa 2004. Like the Democratic nominee eight years ago, Romney has been caught off guard by — and then bristled at — questions about his strength as a potential commander in chief and his commitment to the troops.

When Romney was pressed on the omission on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, he began by quarreling with the question rather than making an affirmative statement about the troops or his war plans.

“I find it interesting that people are curious about mentioning words in a speech as opposed to policy,” he told moderator David Gregory. “I have some differences on policy with the president. I happen to think those are more important than what word I mention in each speech.”

The day before the “Meet the Press” taping, Romney gave a similar answer to Bret Baier of Fox News: “I only regret you’re repeating it day in, day out. [Laughter] … When you give a speech, you don’t go through a laundry list. You talk about the things that you think are important and I describe, in my speech, my commitment to a strong military.”

For Romney, according to top Republicans, the danger is that he has dug an even deeper hole for himself in an area that was already an Obama strength and looks oblivious to the concerns of a crucial Republican constituency — military families and veterans. A CNN poll out Monday found 54 percent of likely voters say Obama would better handle foreign policy, compared with 42 percent who favored Romney.

“When you look at the cultural connection to the military in regions of the country where he needs to over-perform, this opens him to charges that he doesn’t get it — that he’s disconnected from a fundamental part of the Republican constituency,” said Steve Schmidt, senior adviser to McCain in 2008 and key player in the 2004 effort to take down Kerry.

“Democrats, for the first time in a generation, have seized the advantage on national-security issues. That is a remarkable political occurrence. At a time when we have troops in harm’s way for the 11th year, the failure to mention them opens him to a very predictable counterattack.”

A Republican official who works closely with the Romney campaign said, “Defense is not an issue you concede to the Democrats, and that seems to be what the Romney campaign is content to do. You lose close elections because of missed opportunities, not major gaffes. They should welcome a debate about national security, but he goes into the debates on the defensive.”

But a Romney adviser defended the candidate’s handling of the issue, saying he deliberately played down national security at the convention. “This is an economy election and if he gets off on foreign policy or war policy, he’s playing on the president’s turf,” the adviser said.

Obama heads into the three debates ahead on the issue — and the final debate, in Florida on Oct. 22, is specifically on foreign policy.

“Mitt Romney’s failure to mention Afghanistan, and then his comments about how his speech included things you think are important — it’s more than an omission,” Clark said on an Obama campaign conference call for reporters. “It reveals a severe lack of understanding about the job as president.”

Throwing back a phrase Romney used to defend his omission, Clark said that troops are “not an item on a laundry list.”

Ben LaBolt, Obama’s national campaign press secretary, added on the call that Romney “hasn’t outlined a coherent foreign policy yet, beyond tough talk and chest-thumping.”

Obama’s campaign has not run ads on the issue, however, and that will be the ultimate indicator of the potency Democrats ascribe to the issue.

Obama has not always held an advantage on national security. Early in his administration, he was on the defensive over his plan to try terrorism suspects in New York City. Now, with the death of Osama bin Laden and the administration’s use of drone strikes to kill terrorists, national security is one of his greatest strengths. Polls and focus groups show that younger voters, in particular, approve of Obama’s wind-down of the war in Iraq, and his plans to do the same in Afghanistan.

However, Obama has his own continuing vulnerabilities on war policy. His plan for leaving Afghanistan remains largely unfulfilled. On Election Day, there will be about 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, roughly double the number there when Obama took office. He markedly escalated the war, including his troop surge, and most of that escalation remains in place.

Nevertheless, frustrated Republicans see the Romney setback on national security as another rock in the backpack of a campaign that already looked heavy, with polls showing Obama taking a tiny lead in the long-tied race, and Romney falling clearly behind in the vital state of Ohio.

“A presidential election is ultimately a character test,” a top GOP strategist said. “This speaks to the credibility and plausibility of being commander in chief, and any candidate for president has to get over that hump. He looks tone deaf. Everyone is in the faux outrage business. But this time, people are actually offended. He offended military families in some crucial states.”

As Democrats learned in almost every campaign since Vietnam, getting painted as soft on defense, or silent on the greatness of U.S. troops, is a terrible place to be politically. Many Democrats think Kerry would have won in 2004 if he hadn’t been Swift-Boated by ads that called into question his service in Vietnam and patriotism. Democrats aren’t going quite as far as Republicans did in that campaign: No one is accusing Romney of lying about his record. Instead, they’re attacking his lack of resolve.

Ironically, it was the Massachusetts senator himself who offered the most biting indictment of Romney on the issue this time around. In what many consider the best speech of his career — and one that displayed humor and timing rarely if ever shown in 2004 — Kerry did to Romney what Republicans did to him: made him sound like a flip-flopping, unpatriotic wimp.

“No nominee for president should ever fail in the midst of a war to pay tribute to our troops overseas in his acceptance speech,” Kerry said, while pounding Romney for inexperience, naïve understanding of global threats and mixed messages on the Afghanistan war.

“It isn’t fair to say Mitt Romney doesn’t have a position on Afghanistan. He has every position. He was against setting a date for withdrawal, then he said it was right, and then he left the impression that maybe it was wrong to leave this soon. … Talk about being for it before he was against it.”

Kerry started a three-person pile-on on foreign policy, with Biden taking it from there and Obama himself capping it off: “My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy, but from all that we’ve seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.”

Eight years ago, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t have said it better themselves. And that’s why national security-minded Republicans are concerned.

Josh Gerstein and Reid J. Epstein contributed to this report.