When it comes to showing leadership on American national security, the past week has been a very bad one indeed for Mitt Romney. As the nation marked the one year anniversary of the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, voters were reminded that five years ago Romney not only opposed then candidate Obama's call for unilateral U.S. strikes against Bin Laden and other high value targets in Pakistan, but protested that "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."
But Mitt Romney didn't just sleep through that proverbial 3 AM phone call. When it was time to protect his embattled gay - and now former - foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell, Team Romney silenced him during a major conference call with reporters last week. Apparently, Mitt Romney was no more willing to stand up to the fundamentalists in his Republican Party than the Al Qaeda ones encamped in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
As TPM, ThinkProgress and other media outlets reported, the Romney campaign's Thursday call did not go swimmingly. But as the New York Times detailed today, the embarrassments for Romney and his team of Bush administration retreads were hardly limited to John Lehman and Pierre Prosper warning about the "Soviet" threat and the need to protect "Czechoslovakia." Just as important as who was leading that Romney conference call was who wasn't:

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.
It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.
"Ric," said Alex Wong, a policy aide, "the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call." Mr. Wong added, "It's best to lay low for now."
For Mr. Grenell, the message was clear: he had become radioactive.

Radioactive, that is, because Grenell happened to be openly gay.
When Richard Grenell told the Romney camp he was gay during his April interview in Boston, Eric Fehrnstrom of "Etch-a-Sketch" fame reassured him, "It's not an issue for us." But in the face of criticism from Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins and many of the usual suspects on the religious right, the Romney campaign laid low, believing the conservative crisis over Grenell's appointment had "blown over."
As it turned out, not so much.

But the final straw, for Mr. Grenell, was the conference call on April 26. After being told not to speak, he felt deeply undermined, worrying it would erode his credibility with journalists who had expected to hear from him, friends said. One, R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, called it a missed opportunity.
"If one wanted to look at how it could have been done differently, they could have gotten Ric off the bench and onto the field," he said. "There's been a lot going on this week on foreign policy, with Syria, Hillary Clinton in China, Obama in Afghanistan. There's a lot happening where Ric could have been present."
The day after the call, complaints from the religious right picked up steam. In the National Review on April 27, Matthew J. Franck wrote: "Whatever fine record he compiled in the Bush administration, Grenell is more passionate about same-sex marriage than anything else."

Left to twist in the wind, Grenell resigned. The next day, Mitt Romney had a private meeting with many of the same of right-wing media groups to extend "an olive branch" and send the message that "the primary's over and we want you on our side and working with the campaign." Meanwhile, GOProud founder Christopher Barron could only lament:

"It doesn't bode well for the Romney campaign going forward if they couldn't stand up to the most outrageous attacks about him being gay."

And if Mitt Romney can't stand up to attacks from his allies, what about America's enemies?
Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in her 2008 "3 AM" ad reprising Walter Mondale's famous spot 24 years earlier, when a crisis hits the White House at 3 AM:

'Who do you want answering the phone?"

Now as in 2008, Mitt Romney reminded us this week, the answer is Barack Obama.