Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sits down with "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelly. 
 
 President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, tangled over their varying approaches to foreign policy in dueling “60 Minutes” interviews that aired Sunday, with the president brushing off Romney’s charge that he has been weak on national defense and charging that if Romney “is suggesting that we should start another war — he should say so.” 
 
 
 
 The debate on the campaign trail is likely to turn to foreign policy once again this week with Obama slated to address the United Nations on Tuesday in New York at the organization’s annual gathering. 
 
 
 
 In an interview with the CBS program taped on Sept. 12, he defended his efforts to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a conclusion and touted his order to kill Osama bin Laden. And he pushed back against recent pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pinpoint what conditions he would require before launching a military attack on Iran to prevent that country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 
 
 PHOTOS: Mitt Romney’s campaign gaffes 
 
 “When it comes to our national security decisions, any pressure that I feel is simply to do what's right for the American people. And I am going to block out any noise that's out there,” Obama said. At the same time, he said he feels an obligation — “not pressure, but obligation, to make sure that we're in close consultation with the Israelis on these issues. Because it affects them deeply.” 
 
 
 
 Obama also tried to deflect criticism from Romney for his decision not to meet with Netanyahu this week at the U.N. The White House said the meeting was impossible because of scheduling conflicts. As he has on the trail, Romney said in the "60 Minutes" interview that the decision “sends a message throughout the Middle East that somehow we distance ourselves from our friends and I think the exact opposite approach is what’s necessary.” 
 
 
 
 The two men were pressed on their chief vulnerabilities in 2012. In the face of criticism from Romney, who has portrayed him as a hapless commander in chief who is ill-equipped to tackle the nation’s economic challenges, Obama pointed to 30 months of job growth and his tax cuts for middle-income Americans. His opponent’s agenda, he said, would amount to going “backwards to the very policies that got us into this mess.” 
 
 
 
 “The problem that Gov. Romney has is that he seems to only have one note: tax cuts for the wealthy and rolling back regulations as a recipe for success,” Obama said. “Well, we tried that vigorously between 2001 and 2008. And it didn't work out so well.” 
 
 
 
 Romney’s campaign has been foundering since the end of the two party conventions — he has slipped behind Obama in a number of key swing state polls, and he was criticized by even some leading Republicans for criticizing the president’s handling of an attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that led to the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. And the Republican presidential nominee has spent the last week trying to explain his secretly-taped comments at a spring fundraiser that his job “is not to worry about” the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income tax. 
 
 PHOTOS: Obama on the campaign trail 
 
 CBS Anchor Scott Pelley noted that a number of donors and Republican voters were watching to see how he would turn his campaign around. 
 
 
 
 “It doesn’t need a turnaround,” replied the former Massachusetts governor, who insisted that he would win in November. “We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president.” 
 
 
 
 Romney was pressed by Pelley about whether his shifts on key issues like abortion should lead voters to question his fidelity to his beliefs. Romney charged in response that Obama has changed positions on a number of issues, such as the closure of the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, his decision to allow military tribunals to continue there, and his shift to support same-sex marriage. 
 
 
 
 “The principles I have are the principles I've had from the beginning of my political life,” Romney said when pressed about his own evolution by Pelley. “But have I learned? Have I found that some things I thought would be effective turned out not to be effective? Absolutely. If you don't learn from experience, you don't learn from your mistakes—why you know, you ought to be fired.” 
 
 
 
 Romney also touted his tax plan to reduce current income tax rates by 20%, but he said Americans should not expect “a huge reduction in the taxes they owe,” because he said his plan would also limit deductions and exemptions. Though Democrats have skewered his plan as favoring the rich, Romney said he would maintain the progressivity of the tax code—“there should be no tax reduction for high income people.” 
 
 PHOTOS: Paul Ryan's past 
 
 
 
 His aim, he said, is a tax reduction for middle class families by cutting taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains. But the Republican candidate again refused to name the specific tax deductions and exemptions he would phase out, insisting that he and his running mate Paul Ryan would work out those details with Congress. 
 
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 maeve.reston@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @maevereston ||||| CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Mitt Romney, recognizing the damage to his campaign, on Wednesday night backed off his statement from earlier this year that he wouldn’t contend for the support of the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes. 
 
 “My campaign is about the 100 percent of America,” Romney said in his opening comments at a Univision forum here. 
 
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 reset Big Question: What should Romney do? 
 
 Romney repeated the phrase “the 100 percent” three more times in his initial statement. 
 
 It was the furthest the Republican presidential nominee has gone to clean up an issue that has dogged him for three consecutive days. Romney, in remarks that were surreptitiously taped, said at a high-dollar fundraiser in May that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes were sure to back President Barack Obama. 
 
 “My job is not to worry about those people,” he said at the fundraiser, in comments that liberal magazine Mother Jones reported on Monday. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” 
 
 Taking a question on Wednesday about the controversial remarks from a pair of news anchors speaking in Spanish, the former Massachusetts governor struck a very different tone before a live audience at the University of Miami. 
 
 “The last several years, you’ve seen greater and greater divisiveness in this country,” the GOP hopeful said. “We had hoped to come back together. But instead, you’ve seen us pull apart. And politics has driven us apart in some respects. So my campaign is about the 100 percent of America. And I’m concerned about them. I’m concerned about the fact that over the last four years, life has become harder for Americans.” 
 
 Romney didn’t explicitly reference his now-famous comments about “the 47 percent,” but he sought to draw a difference between targeting potential supporters and wanting to help the entire country. 
 
 “I know I’m not going to get 100 percent of the vote, and my campaign will focus on those people we think we can bring in to support me,” he said. “But this is a campaign about helping people who need help and right now, the people who are poor in this country need help getting out of poverty, the people in the middle class need help because their incomes have gone down every year for the last four years.” 
 
 Taking questions for about 30 minutes from the Univision anchors and audience members, Romney used more gentle language on other issues as well, attempting to appeal to a crucial bloc of voters he’s trailing badly with in key states. 
 
 The Republican even embraced the Obama administration’s claim that his Massachusetts health care reform plan made him “the grandfather of Obamacare.” 
 
 “I don’t think he meant that as a compliment but I’ll take it,” Romney said, adding that such a depiction was likely not “helpful” during the GOP primary. 
 
 Romney, responding to a question about whether he’d repeal Obama’s health care law, went on to tout his signature achievement in Boston with language that has irritated conservatives in the past. ||||| Mitt Romney, trying to fend off mounting pressure to release more of his tax returns, stepped up his offense against President Obama on Wednesday, turning Obama’s words against him to argue that the current occupant of the Oval Office is anti-entrepreneur. 
 
 For the second day in a row, the presumed Republican presidential nominee seized on a statement excerpted from a speech Obama made Friday in Virginia. At issue was the president’s quote: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” 
 
 The flap over Obama’s comment has been building for days, fueled by Republicans who say it betrays a mind-set hostile to business. 
 
 “It shows how out of touch he is with the character of America,” Romney told a rally here. “This idea of criticizing and attacking success, of demonizing those in all walks of life who have been successful, is something that is so foreign to us that we can’t understand it.” 
 
 Though potentially damaging in isolation, the president’s words taken in context refer to the idea that the groundwork for success is laid by others. 
 
 “Somebody along the line gave you some help,” Obama said. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” 
 
 And Romney himself — campaigning through swing states such as Ohio, whose 7.3 percent unemployment rate is nearly a full point below the national average — has argued that Republican governors have helped create a climate in which businesses can grow. 
 
 “I was on a bus trip a few weeks ago, you may have seen, across Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan. . . . I was in Indiana, Wisconsin, and these are the states headed by Republican governors, and you know what? They are doing the right things, and it’s making a difference,” Romney said. “It’s time to have the principles of your state here applied in Washington.” 
 
 Romney, animated and at ease as he took questions from the audience, also suggested that Obama cares more about getting reelected than creating jobs. 
 
 “In the last six months, he has held 100 fundraisers, and guess how many meetings he has had with his jobs council?” Romney asked. “None. Zero. Zero in the last six months. So it makes it very clear where his priorities are.” 
 
 Meanwhile, Romney’s backers continued to express concern that he could sustain more political damage by his continued refusal to release more than two years of tax returns, an issue they say is also becoming a distraction from Romney’s message about the economy. 
 
 The candidate has released one year of returns and has promised to make his 2011 return available once it is complete. In April, he filed for an extension on his 2011 return, something his campaign said is similar to what he has done in other years; he has also made public an estimate of his tax liability. 
 
 White House press secretary Jay Carney added to the pressure Wednesday, telling reporters at his daily briefing: “If you are going to run for president, it’s not necessarily comfortable, but it’s become a tradition, and it’s an important one. You make your tax returns available because you think the American people deserve that kind of transparency.” 
 
 A number of prominent conservative voices have also urged Romney to release more of his returns. Among them are two of his former rivals for the Republican nomination, Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as well as the editorial board of the National Review. 
 
 The chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, Wayne MacDonald, said Wednesday that while the decision whether to release more tax returns is ultimately up to Romney, “there’s certainly an upside” to revealing more about his personal finances. 
 
 “Certainly, I don’t think Mitt Romney has anything to hide, and probably the best thing to do is to eliminate any chance for [Democrats] to make this an issue,” MacDonald said in an interview. 
 
 But several other state-level party officials said Romney has released enough financial information. 
 
 Florida GOP Chairman Lenny Curry said that by calling for the tax returns, Obama “wants people to be jealous of and resent wealth” and that the president “is without question wanting a street fight in this campaign.” 
 
 If Democrats want more financial information from Romney, Curry added, they should pass a law requiring it. 
 
 Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have sought to do just that. On Wednesday, Rep. Sander M. Levin (Mich.) and Sens. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Carl Levin (Mich.) introduced legislation that would require candidates to disclose 10 years of tax returns. 
 
 Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, who was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, said that while it is up to Romney to choose whether to release more of his tax information, that decision should not be a crucial issue in the campaign. 
 
 “You know what Americans care about? They don’t care about Mitt Romney’s tax returns,” McDonnell said. “They care about their tax returns.” 
 
 Felicia Sonmez and David Nakamura contributed to this report.
– President Obama is unleashing the latest attack on Mitt Romney's taxes, following the candidates' dueling appearances on 60 Minutes last night, referencing his 47% comments as well as questions over his own tax rate. "Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes, he should come clean on his," intones the ad, which the AP notes begins airing today in Ohio. Highlights from 60 Minutes: Taxes were in the spotlight during Romney's interview, as he defended his own 14.1% tax rate, Politico reports. It's the "right way to encourage economic growth—to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work," he said. Romney also discussed health care, pointing out that an uninsured heart attack victim isn't left to "sit in their apartment and die." Instead, there's the ER: "We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care." Interesting, notes the Huffington Post, because Romney said the opposite on Morning Joe in 2010: "Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility." Obama was similarly on the defensive, notes the Los Angeles Times, as he responded to Romney's suggestion he's been weak on defense. If the former governor "is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so," Obama said. The president acknowledged the frustrations of his job, Politico adds. His "biggest disappointment": not changing "the tone in Washington." "I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem-solving ... I haven’t fully accomplished that," he said.