Mitt Romney targets Obama, ‘career politicians’ in VFW speech

President Obama is a timid commander-in-chief who has doomed the nation to “economic misery,” Mitt Romney charged Tuesday in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Even as new polling shows him suddenly trailing Rick Perry among Republican voters nationwide, Romney continued with a strategy focused on the Democratic president.

Just moments before Obama was to address the American Legion Convention in Minneapolis, Romney invoked the mission that his administration authorized that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, just before he accused him of apologizing for America on the world stage.

“We can’t lead the world by hoping our enemies will hate us less,” Romney said at the 112th VFW National Convention in San Antonio.

Referring to himself twice as a “conservative businessman,” Romney did include a veiled attack on the long-serving Texas governor embedded in a critique of Obama.

The president’s mismanagement of the economy, Romney argued, has the nation “near a threshold of profound economic misery.”

“Four more years on the same political path could prove disastrous,” he said, adding: “Career politicians got us into this mess and they simply don’t know how to get us out!”

Romney curiously based his attack on Obama’s leadership of the military in part on his support for the debt-ceiling deal that includes as a “trigger” the potential for steep cuts in defense spending should lawmakers fail to agree on a course for further deficit reduction.

“American leadership is more than a budget fight. America must lead with clarity of intent, a commitment of purpose and unlimited resolve,” he said.

Romney also charged that Obama believes “that if we could just talk more, engage more, pass more U.N. resolutions, that peace will break out.”

“That may be what they think in that Harvard faculty lounge, but it’s not what they know on the battlefield!” said Romney, himself the recipient of two Harvard degrees.

Romney is set to raise money in Florida later this week before returning to New Hampshire on Friday.