Harold Wilson, who was Prime Minister of Britain twice, in the sixties and seventies, famously said a week is a long time in politics. Sometimes, so is a day. This time yesterday, the conventional wisdom, faithfully trotted out by yours truly among many, was that Obama was coasting to victory in a Presidential sweepstakes that was threatening to peter out in tedium.

So much for that. After last night’s “September surprise,” Obama is still home free, and Mitt Romney is still trailing. In fact, this might well be the death knell for his campaign. But what an uproar.

Romney’s attempt to exploit the violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Egypt and Libya to portray Obama as soft on America’s enemies backfired almost immediately, when it became clear the statement from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo he had cited was issued before the demonstrations began. Overnight, the tragic news came that Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, and three other U.S. officials were killed while trying to flee the besieged U.S. consulate in Benghazi. But still the Mittster didn’t quit seeking to gain political advantage. Speaking in Florida this morning, he repeated the charge that the Obama Administration was failing to stand up for things Americans hold dear, such as freedom of speech. The White House was “standing in apology for our values” and following a “terrible course,” Romney said.

The reaction to Romney’s desperate gambit has been almost universally negative. About the only people who are sticking up for him today are Jim DeMint, the Tea Party senator from South Carolina, and Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard. Even Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, failed to echo his line of attack. Speaking in Wisconsin, Ryan described the killings in Libya as “pretty disturbing,” but he didn’t criticize Obama, and he said it was “a time for healing.”

There will be plenty of time to discuss the rights and wrongs. But before getting into all that, I thought it might be worth setting down how the past twenty-four hours unfolded. With events taking place in three countries, on two continents, there has been a lot of confusion about who said what when. Here’s a quick timeline I put together from the Web. As far as I can see, Romney doesn’t come out of it looking any better. But it does indicate that his attacks initially caused some concern in the White House—enough concern for the Administration to try and distance itself from its loyal servants in Cairo.

Ironically, it all began with a temporary truce between the campaigns to mark the anniversary of 9/11. But yesterday afternoon, demonstrators surrounded the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Benghazi to protest an anti-Islam film, a lengthy trailer for which can be seen on You Tube, that reportedly depicts the prophet Mohammad as a womanizer, a child molester, and an imposter. Initially, the focus was on Egypt. Around noon local time, before the protests against the video began but following threats of violence, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo posted this statement online:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

Embassy staffers also issued a number of tweets that made similar points. Some of these messages were subsequently deleted, but not before a number of Republicans and conservative journalists here in the United States were alerted. One of the tweets said, “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.” Another said, “Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy.” (A report from CBC, the Canadian news organization, reproduces some of the tweets.)

As the day and evening wore on, a couple of thousand demonstrators gathered outside the Cairo embassy. According to a Reuters report from the scene, most of them were youthful supporters of Islamic groups or “ultras,” the soccer fans who played a big role in bringing down Hosni Mubarak. Some of the demonstrators tried to scale the walls of the fortress-liked compound. Eventually, they succeeded, seizing a U.S. flag and setting it alight before the television cameras. Reuters reports that there were about twenty people atop the embassy wall, and they tried to raise their own black flag, emblazoned with the words: “There is no god but God, and Mohammad is his messenger.”

In Benghazi, a city in eastern Libya, meanwhile, a similar protest was taking place, and it, too, was turning violent. Militia men armed with grenades raided the U.S. consulate and set it on fire. Initially, Libyan officials said that one embassy worker had been killed. “The other staff members were evacuated and are safe and sound,” Libya’s deputy interior minister Wanis al-Sharif told AFP news agency. A news story from the BBC posted at about 9 P.M. E.T. said that the identity of the dead U.S. official wasn’t yet known, but he had reportedly been shot.

In response to the killing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement on Tuesday night that said,