COOPER:

Fareed, do you have any reason to believe that president was not referring to Benghazi when he said acts of terror in those remarks?

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN WORLD AFFAIRS ANALYST:

No.

Look, the commonsense reading of it is that he was referring to acts of terror. There is sort of an artful interpretation that David has. I'm not actually sure. I think this is a red herring.

Look, even if a mob had spontaneously gathered because of the video and decided to charge the U.S. Embassy and killed the U.S. ambassador, two Navy SEALs and another American, that's still an act of terrorism. Right? Terrorism is basically the taking of the lives of particularly civilians in a political act that is designed to have some kind of political impact.

That strikes me as an act of terrorism whether or not it was a mob or al Qaeda. Was it an act of terrorism perpetrated by a terrorist organization affiliated with al Qaeda with planning and forethought? That we don't know. But I don't really see how it wasn't an act of terrorism no matter who did it.

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AXELROD: Well, look, I think what the president said last night was very, very clear. He feels a -- he takes responsibility for every single person we send overseas in diplomatic missions, in dangerous places, as well as our service people. And I know, as someone who's close to him, I know how personally he takes that. And his reaction to this tragedy, to this heinous attack, is, A, to do what we need to to bring the people who did it to justice. B, to find out what went wrong so that we can correct it and make sure that we have -- that we give our diplomats all the protection that they need in the future.

You can't 100 percent guarantee anything but we want to do the best that we can possibly do. And so, you know, that has been -- that has been the case from the beginning of this. The president did what the president should which is to say, let's get to the bottom of this and let's correct it and let's go after the people who did it.

Governor Romney, on the other hand, approached this as a political opportunity. And it shouldn't be a surprise, Piers, because if you go back to that famous 47 percent tape from Boca Raton, he told that audience that night when -- I'm looking forward to a -- some sort of problem, some sort of incident in foreign policy and national security, and we're going to take advantage of that opportunity.

And he couldn't even wait for the facts to leap out there and try and exploit this. And he's continued to try and exploit it, while the president is about the business of finding out what happened and acting on it. And that's what people want from a president of the United States.

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