Romney's roster of good deeds only starts with his donations to charity. Romney's substantial inheritance from his wealthy father was donated to charity; despite being born to money, his own wealth comes from his own business career. Romney's tax returns show that he donated over $7 million in 2010-2011 alone, over 16% of his income. Edwin Durgy at Forbes has more on the Romneys' charitable giving:

Romney and his wife Ann also maintain a separate foundation, established in 1999...The couple have contributed approximately$13.6 million, including an initial gift of more than $3.6 million, to their Tyler Charitable Foundation, based in Boston, MA, in the past 13 years.

Since the Tyler Foundation began making grants in 2000, its annual disbursements have averaged approximately $650,000 per year. The foundation's most active years were 2003 and 2008, with approximately $2 million given away in each. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, the foundation hit its average, donating $650,000.

This is admirable in itself. But for wealthy philanthropists, writing checks can be easy. Romney has gone the extra mile, giving of his own time. There are many examples:

One cold December day in the early 1980s, Mitt Romney loaded up his Gran Torino with firewood and brought it to the home of a single mother whose heat had been shut off just days before Christmas.

Years after a business partner died unexpectedly, Romney helped the man's surviving daughter go to medical school with loans for tuition - loans he forgave when she graduated.

And in 1997, when a fellow church member's teenage son fell seriously ill, Romney sprinted to the hospital in the dead of night, where he kept vigil with his terrified parents.

Reed Fisher tells one such story, from 2007:

That story begins in the aftermath of the wildfires that engulfed San Diego in the fall of 2007, consuming dozens of homes in Reed Fisher's neighborhood and nearly his own.

Fisher told CBS News the fire did burn a hole through a fence and caught the corner of his house.

While the house was being repaired Fisher got a call from a fellow Mormon, one of his son's friends, offering help. It was Matt Romney, one of Mitt Romney's five sons.

When asked what he said, Fisher said, "We would like to come help. We would like to come do something. And I said, 'Matt, I wish you could, but almost everything has been cleaned up.' But he pressed me, and I said, 'Well, there is this one thing. And I don't know if the insurance is going to cover it. There is a big tree stump in my front yard. They took the tree down, the tree was torched in the fire. But the stump was still there.' So Matt insisted, he said, 'We would like to bring a couple of guys and do some service at your house.'"

On that day, Fisher said he ran out to get some breakfast for the volunteers. Fisher said, "As I drove down to my house, there are four men working in the hole there, ... and one of them is running for President of the United States of America."

That man was Romney. When his son told him about the service project, he had asked if he could help.

"He had dirt under his fingernails," Fisher said. "He was the first one down the hole. He's the first one with the power saw. He's doing the hardest work of any of us."

The Nixon family tells another:

On April 4, 1995, four of Mark and Sheryl Nixon's six children were driving back from a youth group meeting outside Boston when the driver of the minivan they were in lost control of the vehicle, which side-swiped a utility pole, struck two trees and flipped over.

The two front seat passengers - Rob and Reed Nixon, both high-school athletes - were severely injured in the wreck, their necks shattered, their bodies paralyzed. The boys underwent numerous surgeries, and the family quickly incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses, not only for the treatments but also for a special van and an addition to their house to accommodate their sons' conditions.

New to the Boston area and without the means to pay for their sons' care, the Nixons had few places to turn for help.

Enter Mitt Romney. On Christmas Eve, the Romney family showed up at the Nixon home unannounced, bearing large boxes full of gifts, including a stereo system, VCR and a generous check for Rob, Reed and the entire Nixon family.

"I knew [Romney's] schedule. I knew how busy he was. And their whole family came. He was actually teaching his boys, saying, 'This is what we do. We do this as a family,'" Mark Nixon told Michael Kranish and Scott Helman in "The Real Romney." "We've never forgotten it," Sheryl added. "It stood out so much in our minds and helped us to want to be better parents, too."

Romney later offered to pay for the boys' college education and participated in a 5K road race and fundraiser for them. In subsequent years, he also made large financial gifts to a golf tournament in their honor.

Bryce Clark's story is about reaching out with compassion and mentoring that helped him find sobriety out of addiction:

Late one summer night in 1993, distraught over his descent into alcoholism and drug use, Mr. Clark, then a 19-year-old college student, decided to confess that he had strayed from his Mormon faith. So he drove through this well-heeled Boston suburb to Mr. Romney’s secluded seven-bedroom home.

As the highest-ranking Mormon leader in Boston, Mr. Romney was responsible for determining whether Mr. Clark was spiritually fit for a mission, a rite of passage for young Mormon men. Mr. Clark had previously lied to him, insisting that he was eligible to go. But instead of condemnation that night, Mr. Clark said, Mr. Romney offered counsel that the younger man has clung to for years.

"He told me that, as human beings, our work isn't measured by taking the sum of our good deeds and the sum of our bad deeds and seeing how things even out," recalled Mr. Clark, now 37, sober and working as a filmmaker in Utah. "He said, 'The only thing you need to think about is: Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.'"

Another congregant was inspired by Romney's example of service:

When Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, and his wife, Christine, felt overwhelmed by church obligations, Mr. Romney showed up unexpectedly at the door. With three young children, Mr. Christensen was in charge of missionary work; his wife ran the relief society, ministering to Boston's poor.

"He said, 'I was just driving home from work, and I had a feeling that I needed to stop by and tell you that God loves you.'" Mr. Christensen was so moved, he recalled, that he wept.

Not all of Romney's outreach efforts were as successful as the Washington Post's account of Romney's outreach to the Hatian community, the NY Times notes that "[w]hen young Southeast Asian converts began joining gangs, Mr. Romney set up small storefront churches in rough areas of town, with the hope of drawing them back," but to no avail. But other communities felt the touch of Romney's generosity and compassion, even if it meant bending the rules a little:

In the back office of his Weston, Mass., headquarters a quarter-­century ago, Mitt Romney, the chief Mormon authority in the Boston area, told the leader of his Spanish-speaking congregation that he would not directly pay for lawyers to help the growing number of illegal immigrants in his church. Then he carefully instructed his subordinate on how to circumvent the Mormon Church's new hard line against such assistance and subsidize their legal aide.

"In those issues I cannot help you financially to pay for lawyers," Romney said, according to Jose Francisco Anleu, a Guatemalan immigrant. "But what I can do is allow you to give them food assistance from the bishop's warehouse," a church welfare pantry. The money saved could be used to "pay lawyers." He reminded Anleu that he could use church funds to cover rent, utilities and health care for his needy members. The money came from Anleu's budget, but, as Anleu noted decades later, it was a budget sustained by Romney's office.

...Marco Velasquez, an immigrant from Guatemala, said that under Romney the church held workshops to learn English and make gallons of inexpensive liquid soap. He also said that while he had papers, most of the other Latino members did not. Some came on three-month tourist visas and stayed. Many of the Central Americans, he said, simply walked across the border into Texas and made their way up to Boston.

"There is always a way to get papers - you had to pay extra," said Velasquez, who added that he had a network in East Boston that could get people Social Security cards - "but they were not real." A counselor in Cambridge before digging his shovel into the ground alongside Romney at the Boston branch's groundbreaking, he said the church "had to know, but they didn't say anything." The same, he said, went for Romney. "He probably suspected that I was doing it."

Sometimes, Romney's generosity even came out of his propensity for gaffes:

Ken Smith, the former director of the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, also came on Beck's show to discuss what Buzzfeed called "a cringe worthy moment in 1994."

During the visit to the shelter, Smith said Romney first looked at the shelter's books for about 45 minutes and then took a tour of the facility. At the end of the tour, Romney asked what Smith's biggest problem was. Smith told him the shelter had problems paying for milk, and Romney replied, "Well Ken, maybe you can teach the vets to milk cows."

The next day, Smith said, the newspapers were killing him for the remark, and Romney called Smith to apologize. The following day, the milkman showed up, offloaded his milk and gave Smith a bill that was half of its normal size. The same things happened for a month, two months, three months, and then for a full two years, Smith said. Finally, on the day the milkman was to retire, he told Smith that Romney had been paying for the milk.

"Romney's generosity has helped tens of thousands of veterans who are homeless, who have been through this facility, with nourishment," Smith said. "The milk cartons said the name of the milk company, it didn't say, 'donated by Mitt Romney.'"

(You can see video of the testimonials from Smith and some of the others here)

Romney is also the kind of many you could depend on to rise to the occasion in a crisis:

When the daughter of Bob Gay, a Bain colleague who once sat with Romney on the church's high council, vanished, Romney shut down his Bain offices and arranged for a search party. After she was found shaken but safe in New Jersey, Romney boarded a bus to the airport with John Hoffmire, another Bain colleague who belonged to the church. Tears welled up in Romney's eyes as he talked about his journey through New York's rave clubs showing teenagers a picture of Gay's daughter.

"I looked at this young man, and he had a bolt through his lip," Hoffmire recalled Romney telling him. "But the strongest feeling came over me, and I just thought, 'The heavenly father loved that young man just as much as he loved anybody.'"

Snopes has more, including Gay being quoted at the time - while his daughter was recovering in detox after "a massive dose of ecstasy," saying "I'm not sure we would have gotten her back without" Romney.

Romney could even ride to the rescue when more dramatic personal action was required:

It's a story that's not often told. Mitt Romney at his family's summer home in Wolfeboro, N.H. on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee whisking into the night on a Jet Ski with two of his sons to rescue a drowning family of four, their two friends, and their dog.

On the weekend of July 4th, 2003, the Romney family was enjoying their picturesque summer home in New Hampshire on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee...

"We heard a whole bunch of screaming," Josh Romney told the Boston Herald. The Romney brothers and their father quickly raced to their Jet Skis. "We tore out of there and my dad hopped on the other Jet Ski and came out right after us."

The screams came from Robert Morrissey, of New Jersey, his wife, their two adult children, two family friends, and the family dog.

The family...were sailing peacefully in their 20-foot long wooden boat until it began to take on water. Within three minutes it had begun to sink.

...'This happened really, really fast,'' Mr. Morrissey said in 2003. When the boat started to sink, he dialed 911 on his cellphone as fast as he could. ''As I'm making the call, the boat is going down under my feet.''

Romney and his sons followed the shouts to find the group floating in the darkness treading water alongside their dog.

The Governor heaved the youngest two women onto his Jet Ski, a three-seater, and raced back to shore. The two Romney sons stayed with the rest of the family until the Governor returned to ferry the rest of the family, and their dog, safely to dry land.

Click the links above, all of which have much longer accounts of these and other stories of Romney's good works.

You may choose to dislike Romney's politics, his policies, his ham-handed speeches. But what a better country we would have if half the people attacking him now could compile half of the list above. Compared to Barack Obama, who had half his house paid for by a slumlord convicted of bribing politicians, I'd rather depend on Mitt Romney if I really needed a friend when the chips were down.

Rudy Giuliani nailed this point in his 2008 convention speech, noting Obama's response to the Russian invasion of Georgia and connecting it to Obama's habit of voting "present" as a State Senator (Obama had rather famously coasted through his tenure as a State Senator, gaining most of his successful bill sponsorships from having his name added late to things on which other people had carried the load.):

When Russia rolled over Georgia, John McCain immediately established a very strong, informed position that let the world know how he'll respond as president at exactly the right time. Remember his words? Remember what John McCain said? "We are all Georgians."

Obama's -- talk about judgment. Let's look at what Obama did. Obama's first instinct was to create a moral equivalency, suggesting that both sides were equally responsible, the same moral equivalency that he's displayed in discussing the Palestinian Authority and the state of Israel.

Later -- later, after discussing this with his 300 foreign policy advisers, he changed his position, and he suggested the United Nations Security Council could find a solution.

Apparently, none of his 300 foreign policy security advisers told him that Russia has a veto power in the United Nations Security Council.

By the way, this was about three days later. So -- so he changed his position again, and he put out a statement exactly like the statement of John McCain's three days earlier.

I have some advice for Senator Obama: Next time, call John McCain.

Look at how this leadership style played out in the 2008 financial crisis. As I noted at the time, while scores of other people in both parties - George W. Bush, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Eric Cantor - flew into a whirl of activity and staked out difficult positions and John McCain (foolishly) suspended his campaign to offer his assistance, Obama sat back, took no active part in events or in leading his own party, and collected the political winnings while the public turned on everyone involved. Obama stated in public that "what I've told the leadership in Congress is that, if I can be helpful, then I am prepared to be anywhere, anytime"; nobody ever called him.

In 2009, military commanders pressed Obama for more troops in Afghanistan, stressing that this was critical to their mission. Obama kept putting off the decision, letting months go by before he committed to a troop surge. But as we now know, Obama never intended to follow through in actually seeing the Afghan war to a victorious conclusion, and never even set concrete war aims. By the time of last week's convention speech, Obama was reduced to arguing that "[w]e've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan," which is not exactly "veni, vidi, vici."

Meanwhile, the fall of 2009 also saw the outbreak of popular protest in Iran, the unsuccessful "Green Revolution." Obama was famously slow to offer even tepid public support for the pro-democracy, anti-mullah protests, and eventually turned down a request for help from its leaders. He preferred not to get involved.

Then we had 2010's BP oil spill. This time, decisive leadership at the top was clearly needed. But again, Obama was passive. The federal bureaucracy moved sluggishly, bereft of direction from Obama. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was out in front on the local response, but faced delays as the Administration dragged its feet. Public anger again turned first on BP, but this time, voters noticed that Obama wasn't reacting like a leader, contributing to his falling job approval ratings.

Obama has rarely been out in front of the response to domestic natural disasters, from his arms-length response to 2009's ice storms in Kentucky to belatedly visiting New Orleans, after Mitt Romney, following Hurricane Isaac last month.

He has similarly often remained aloof from the kind of arm-twisting on Capitol Hill that is generally associated with party leadership, an unusual trait for a president who came from the Senate; many accounts from Beltway insiders attest to the fact that Obama doesn't spend much time with his own caucus, leaving the heavy lifting of keeping the party in line to Pelosi and Reid. As the New York Times describes Bob Woodward's account of Obama's legislative leadership style in his latest book:

Many aspects of this book's portrait of Mr. Obama echo reports from other journalists and Washington insiders: a president who has not spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, and who has similarly distant (if not downright tense) relationships with business executives; an idealistic but sometimes naive and overconfident chief executive with little managerial experience and little understanding of the horse-trading and deal-making that make Washington run (skills that, say, Lyndon B. Johnson possessed in spades).

...Another scene in this book, from early 2009, describes Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, then the House speaker, working with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, on last-minute details of the stimulus package when the president calls. As Mr. Obama - who's been put on speakerphone - begins to deliver a high-minded message about how important the bill is, Mr. Woodward reports, Ms. Pelosi "reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone," so they could hear him but he couldn't hear them as they continued number-crunching the bill.

When the "Arab Spring" came to Egypt, Obama was conflicted, remaining silent during much of the protests but eventually, at the end, pressuring Hosni Mubarak to step down. In the end, he won neither the gratitude of the rebels nor of Mubarak's supporters around the region. Today, as protestors attack the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Obama admits that Egypt is no longer a U.S. ally.

Fast forward to the early March 2011 outbreak of war in Libya. Some, like Sarah Palin, wanted the U.S. to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya in support of the rebels. As I explained at the time, whether or not you agreed with Palin, her view made more sense if you acted quickly, rather than waiting - as Obama did - to start one weeks later when the regime had had time to put its forces in place and the rebels had been backed into a single city (Benghazi). Obama promised that the war would last "days, not weeks": it took five months. The mission, at least publicly billed as giving a larger role to European NATO allies that considered Libya part of their traditional sphere of influence, was memorably described as putting Obama and the United States in the position of "leading from behind," and Obama never even bothered asking for Congressional approval, which would have required him to rally public support.

Meanwhile, even the high point of Obama's presidency - the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden - went forward only after Obama reportedly cancelled the mission three times over the prior four months and slept on the final decision, waiting sixteen hours to give the green light.

Then there were the negotiations with Congress over the budget crisis in July and August 2011, leading to a short-term deal and the downgrading of America's credit rating. As I detailed at the time, Obama not only refused to put his own plan on the table at any time (leaving Republicans to bid against themselves) and refused to negotiate in public (leaving the voters stuck sorting through he-said-she-said accounts of who actually was willing to do what), but even the modest deal that was eventually struck was worked out by Congressional leaders once Obama was out of the picture:

At one point, GOP officials said, the Democratic and Republican leaders asked Obama and his aides to leave the room to let them negotiate.

A tentative deal was subsequently struck, but Obama privately threatened to veto it, the sources said.

Reid has repeatedly denied that he ever signed off on such an agreement.

The following day, staffers for Boehner, Cantor, Reid and McConnell continued to work on an agreement, according to Republicans.

After more twists and turns - and involvement from Vice President Biden - a bipartisan deal was reached a week later.

Obama's response to the civil war in Syria has been almost as diffident as his reactions to Iran and Egypt, threatening the regime if it uses chemical weapons but otherwise remaining on the sidelines as massacres proceed.

(UPDATE: These are not, of course, the only examples of Obama's sluggish responses to crises or his lead-from-behind approach. In 2009, Obama waited three days to speak from Hawaii on the Christmas Day underwear bomber, downplaying the bomber's international-terror ties: "This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist." Only later would he address the Al Qaeda connection. Earlier this year, Obama finally came out publicly in support of same sex marriage, a position people on all sides of the issue widely suspected him of favoring, only after public statements by Vice President Biden forced his hand.)

Now, the embassies. Mitt Romney is taking a pounding in the press for acting quickly to put out a statement, one that was quickly overtaken by events when the State Department and unnamed White House officials distanced themselves from earlier public statements by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Obama now says that Romney - one of the most famously calculating and cautious people in politics - took a "shoot first, aim later" approach to the controversy by criticizing the Embassy. This is a window into Obama's thinking: he himself was silent until the next morning, and considers Romney foolish for acting swiftly and vigorously - for showing his cards first. Obama has still not taken questions on the rising violence at the embassies, and jetted off last night to campaign in Las Vegas, leaving unclear how his Administration intends to react to the rising tide of violent protest.

Caution and deliberation are not necessarily bad things; important decisions sometimes take time and require the gathering of additional information, and consensuses sometimes form better without heavy-handed leadership. Sometimes, an empty chair is all the leadership we need. Certainly, in at least some of the crises Obama has faced in the Middle East, doing more would have risked creating even bigger problems. But the next four years will present more occasions when active leadership is needed - leadership on facing down Iran, leadership on containing America's public spending, entitlement and debt crises. Barack Obama has proven, time and again, that he'd rather wait for somebody else to step up so he can decide who to follow. America deserves better.

I looked at this in more detail based on accounts at the time (as did Ace), and little new has come to light since to change that picture; let's review how the pieces of Bush-era national security and intelligence policy fell into place to pinpoint Osama bin Laden in May 2011:

A. Guantanamo and CIA Detention Centers

What we know, based on what's been made public, is that bin Laden was located primarily by means of following a trail of intelligence that revealed that he was communicating with the outside world mainly via a single faithful courier, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And the leads that gave us that knowledge came from the interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and CIA "black site" detention centers. Those detainees included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda operational chief Abu Faraj al-Libi, "20th hijacker" Muhammad Mani al-Qahtani, and Hassan Ghul, an associate of Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

None of this would have been possible if these detainees were treated as ordinary prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, to be asked only the proverbial name, rank and serial number. Barack Obama campaigned against these detention and interrogation sites, closed the CIA "black sites" his first week in office, and is still promising (albeit in increasingly empty fashion) to close Guantanamo (indeed, the 2012 Democratic platform is still promising that "we are substantially reducing the population at Guantanamo Bay without adding to it. And we remain committed to working with all branches of government to close the prison altogether because it is inconsistent with our national security interests and our values."). The finding of bin Laden is an unambiguous victory for the detention and interrogation policies of the Bush Administration. And with those sites not accepting new detainees and the Administration switching emphasis to killing rather than capturing and interrogating enemy combatants, it is questionable whether that success can be replicated in the future, with terrorist leaders like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar still at large.

B. Iraq

Of the detainees questioned on the path to tracking al-Kuwaiti, the one that investigators have described as the "linchpin" of the whole investigation is Hassan Ghul. And where did we capture Hassan Ghul? In Iraq in 2004, reportedly by a Kurdish security checkpoint on the Iranian border carrying a message from Zarqawi to bin Laden asking for bin Laden's support in the insurgency. Of course, none of this would have happened had Iraq remained a Saddam Hussein-run police state hostile to the United States. If we hadn't invaded Iraq, we would not have captured Ghul, and bin Laden would still be alive. Does that, all by itself, justify the Iraq War? I wouldn't go that far - there are a whole battery of considerations that we've all exhaustively beaten to death in that debate. But yet again: Barack Obama opposed the war, and without it, he wouldn't have had the intelligence to get bin Laden.

C. NSA Surveillance

Electronic surveillance also played a key part in locating al-Kuwaiti: at some point between when the CIA pieced together his identity around 2007 and when he was located in 2009, the NSA surveillance net - the subject of much criticism back in the 2005-08 period - was set out to track calls between al-Kuwaiti's family members and associates and anyone in Pakistan. I've seen no reference anywhere to a warrant ever having been obtained for this eavesdropping, and it worked exactly as defenders of warrantless eavesdropping predicted it might. As I argued back in 2005, there was never a policy reason to object to this sort of thing, as long as it was targeted as described (which it was here: to known associates and relatives of al-Kuwaiti).

As a legal matter, was a warrant needed, under the theory of the critics? It's not clear one was, as most of the public sources indicate that al-Kuwaiti's relatives (at least the ones he was caught communicating with) were in the Persian Gulf, not inside the United States. But it's clear that the very same tool at issue in the FISA controversy was crucial to locating al-Kuwaiti and therefore bin Laden.

D. Coercive Interrogation

The three points above have barely even been contested by the once-noisy critics of Bush Administration policies; they have circled all their wagons around denying that coercive interrogation produced any returns, in line with their longstanding insistence that such interrogation has never, ever worked in any situation and never, ever conceivably could in any possible situation.

But the facts are more complex. The Bush Administration authorized the use of waterboarding on only three detainees, but Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was one of them, and he later provided key intelligence; you can draw your own conclusions as to whether confessing to the good cop means the bad cop accomplished nothing, but it's safe to say that if this was a criminal trial, bin Laden's lawyers would be arguing that any information obtained after waterboarding was "fruit of the poisonous tree." Ghul appears to have been subjected to a number of the lesser coercive tactics, and al-Qahtani seems to as well. While basically everyone agrees that it's preferable to use non-coercive interrogation techniques when possible, the record here suggests that a little humility by those calling for a total ban would be advisable, let alone attempting to pocket political winnings from the interrogation of these detainees.

Osama bin Laden is dead because our intelligence and our military found where he was hiding, using tools and leads inherited from the Bush Administration. If President Obama and Vice President Biden want to take credit for the easy decision to act on that information, well, there's enough credit to go around. But they deserve no credit for finding him in the first place.