But here's the main point about Carter. Deciding to go ahead with that raid was a close call. Carter's own Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, had opposed the raid and handed in his resignation even before the results were known. And it was a daring call -- a choice in favor of a risky possible solution to a festering problem, knowing that if it went wrong there would be bad consequences all around, including for Carter himself. So if you say "even Jimmy Carter" to mean "even a wimp," as Romney clearly did, you're showing that you don't know the first thing about the choice he really made.

3) Precisely because of the consequences of Carter's failure, Obama was the more daring in making his go/no-go decision. That's the case I argued last year, and nothing I've learned since then changes my view. As a college student, Obama had seen a marginally popular Democratic president come to ruin because he approved a helicopter-based secret mission into hostile Middle Eastern terrain. Obama went ahead with a helicopter-based secret mission into nominally "allied" territory, also with huge potential for trouble if things had gone wrong.

4) And while the Osama killing reflected a decade's worth of intelligence and effort from people of both parties, and of no party, it happened on Obama's watch. Is there any doubt that if it had happened on Bush's, or on a President John McCain's, it would have been the centerpiece of every political speech and commercial? Was there a single speech in the Republicans' 2004 convention -- in New York -- that did not begin and end with a reference to 9/11, or the removal of Saddam Hussein?

So: obviously the Administration will want to remind voters that Osama bin Laden is gone, and obviously the Republicans will want to minimize the political significance of that fact. All fine. But not "even Jimmy Carter." I hope that the crack was a scripted attack line, rather than being yet another spontaneous glimpse of the way Mitt Romney feels and thinks. "Even" Jimmy Carter made a daring choice, and paid the price.

