Washington: As President Barack Obama faces one crisis after another, Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent in the November election, says "it kills me" not to be in the White House finding solutions to the nation's problems.
"I'll look at what's happening right now, I wish I were there," Romney told Fox News Sunday said in his first television interview since the election suggesting he would have been more effective in the current political situation.
Accusing Obama of "campaigning" rather than governing as the sequester - $85 billion across the board spending cuts that kicked in Friday - loomed, he said: "It kills me not to be there, not to be in the White House doing what needs to be done."
"The president is the leader of the nation. The president brings people together, does the deals, does the trades, knocks the heads together; the president leads. And - and I don't see that kind of - of leadership happening right now," he said.
Romney said that he was convinced he'd win until Ohio's vote came in, and that he damaged his campaign by failing to attract black and Hispanic voters and speaking too freely in his infamous "47 percent" comments.
"I think we were convinced we would win. We saw that the polls were very close, but we knew that the energy and passion was with our voters. My heart said we were going to win," he said.
Romney said he doesn't look back at the campaign with anger or regret.
"You look back at the campaign and say, 'OK, what did the president do well?' And you acknowledge that his campaign did a number of things very effectively.
"Of course you rehearse all the mistakes that you made, and I went through a number of my mistakes, I'm sure. Then you think about the things that were out of your control. But you move on. I don't spend my life looking back," said Romney.
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First Published: Monday, March 04, 2013, 10:22