In an election like this one, when the economy is the main issue and everyone’s sick of war, foreign-policy discussions often end up being more about symbolism and semantics than actual policy. That’s fine, as far as it goes—not ideal, but the way politics works. But when a candidate and his supporters forget that they’re playing a game and start actually confusing symbolism and semantics for policy? That’s when the problems start.

Since at least 2010, when he released his book “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” Romney has centered his foreign-policy platform around his base’s critique of President Obama’s performance: Obama apologizes for America, he doesn’t pay tribute to American exceptionalism, he doesn’t sound strong enough when he talks about terrorism. For Romney, it’s the easy way out—he makes Republicans happy by focussing on symbols and without getting into anything, like new wars or George W. Bush’s record, that might turn off a mass of voters. (I’ve previously written about this as Romney’s Not-Obama Doctrine.)

But at the town-hall debate on Tuesday night, this style of doing things got Romney in trouble. There are any number of valid criticisms of the Obama Administration and its actions in Benghazi, both before and after the attacks that killed four Americans at our consulate there: they didn’t keep their diplomats safe; for months, they failed to heed the warnings and requests from the people on the ground; they were unable to secure the site and any sensitive material contained in it for some time after the incident; they were either ignorant about what really happened, or misled the country. But those weren’t the points Romney was really interested in: what he found “more troubling” than what the President knew, he said, was

that on the day following the assassination of the United States ambassador—the first time that’s happened since 1979—when we have four Americans killed there, when apparently we didn’t know what happened, that the President, the day after that happened, flies to Las Vegas for a political fundraiser, then the next day to Colorado for another event, another political event. I think these actions taken by a President and a leader have symbolic significance, and perhaps even material significance in that you’d hope that during that time we could call in the people who were actually eyewitnesses. We’ve read their accounts now about what happened. It was very clear this was not a demonstration. This was an attack by terrorists.

Romney said it himself there: the thing he finds most troubling is that the President did a fundraiser—and that, apparently, says something truly meaningful about Obama’s entire foreign policy. And he places great weight on “symbolic significance,” which even he acknowledges doesn’t actually really rise to “material significance.”

After that, and with the benefit of a little hindsight, the exchange that came soon after, when Romney got himself caught in a loop arguing with Obama and moderator Candy Crowley over whether Obama had called the attack “an act of terror” in a Rose Garden speech, was predictable. It was symbolism—symbolism important to the Republican base—over substance. And it was Romney falling into a trap of his own making, because this was one instance where the substantive argument was clearly the more effective one. The question of whether Obama called terror terror gets the right going, but it’s ultimately a small point at best. There was a far bigger one that Romney could have made instead: the Administration was either so incompetent that it didn’t know what had actually happened for weeks after the attack, or it lied for political gain. The two arguments start from essentially the same place—when did Obama and his Administration first talk about what actually happened in Benghazi—but in order to see the more effective one, you have to be willing to move past pure symbolism. When it comes to foreign policy, Romney has yet to do that.

Read more of our debate coverage.

Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty.