Romney praises Cheney, zings Obama

Mitt Romney, who ran to succeed the Bush-Cheney team in the White House, unsurprisingly says that former Vice President Dick Cheney got the better of President Obama in today's duel on national security.

"Two speeches, two very different men. Former Vice President Cheney seeks no political future. He speaks from the vantage of one who witnessed the killing of our fellow citizens, who deliberated and defined the strategy that would successfully prevent further murders of our fellow Americans," Romney wrote on the National Review magazine's political blog. "His address today was direct, well-reasoned, and convincing."

As for Obama, the former Massachusetts governor said, he "continues to speak as a politician....His speech and his policies have one foot in campaign mode and another in presidential mode. He struggles to explain how he is keeping faith with the liberal advocates who promoted his campaign but in doing so, he breaks faith with the interests of the American people. When it comes to protecting the nation, we have a conflicted president. And his address today was more tortured than the enhanced interrogation techniques he decries."

Romney ends his take with this zinger about Obama: "He said that the last thing he thinks about when he goes to sleep at night is keeping America safe. That's a big difference with Vice President Cheney—when it came to protecting Americans, he never went to sleep."