Hempstead, NY - A series of missteps by Republican nominee Mitt Romney in criticizing President Obama’s account of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, may make it harder for him to continue using the incident as the heart of his wider complaint about the incumbent’s foreign policy record.

Romney has seized on the coordinated attack, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, to back his contention that Obama has weakened the U.S. presence in the world and overseen an intentional diminution of American influence abroad.

In an election likely to be decided on economic issues, Romney’s move into foreign policy has stirred tensions within his campaign. But it has also put in play an issue — management of foreign policy — on which Obama once held a commanding lead.

The presidential debate Tuesday, however, again showed the perils that Romney faces in using the Libya attack to go after the president’s leadership abroad.

He mistakenly said Obama took weeks to call the Benghazi assault “an act of terror,” even though, as moderator Candy Crowley pointed out, the president used those words in a statement he made from the Rose Garden a day after the attack.

“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said at the time. At another point in the remarks, he called the attack “outrageous and shocking,” though he refrained from using the term “terrorism” to describe it directly.

The Romney campaign contended immediately after the debate that Obama continues to offer confusing accounts of what happened in Benghazi, and the angry exchange over Libya on Tuesday provided no new facts to clarify how and why the attack took place.

The Obama administration has offered shifting explanations for how Stevens and the three other Americans were killed, attributing the deaths variously to an attack that emerged from demonstrations over a YouTube video disparaging the prophet Muhammad to a well-coordinated assault carried out by the al-Qaeda affiliate in North Africa.