(CBS News) UNITED NATIONS HEADQUATERS, New York - President Obama arrived in New York Monday afternoon for the United Nations General Assembly. One of the main topics of discussion at this annual meeting will be the recent unrest outside U.S. embassies in the Muslim world, including an attack in Benghazi, Libya, which claimed the lives of four Americans. But unlike years past, the president will not be sitting down with any of the more than 120 world leaders who are here in New York. 
 
 Simply put, the White House is prioritizing the president's reelection effort. Most heads of state will be here all week, but the president will be in New York less than 24 hours, and even then will spend most of his time away from this conference. 
 
 After landing in New York Monday afternoon, the president headed straight for a sit-down -- not with visiting leaders, but with the ladies of "The View," for an interview to air tomorrow. 
 
 Last year at the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama held 13 one-on-one meetings with major leaders. 
 
 But this year diplomacy is taking a back seat to campaigning, despite a worsening civil war in Syria, rising tensions between Israel and Iran, and the recent attack in Libya. 
 
 In the president's absence, it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who met with Libya's president Monday, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan. 
 
 "The president and the Libyan government have been staunch partners to the United States," Clinton said. 
 
 White House spokesman Jay Carney pointed out Mr. Obama is hosting two receptions for world leaders tonight, and speaks with them on the phone all the time. 
 
 "The fact of the matter is, the president does not wait for an annual meeting to have consultations with or meetings with foreign leaders, and they will continue," Carney said. 
 
 The president will lay out a set of priorities for the U.N. General Assembly in a speech Tuesday morning, but he flies back to Washington a few hours later and then makes a campaign trip to Ohio on Wednesday. ||||| NEW YORK—President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama bantered playfully and held hands Monday during a taping of the female-oriented talk show, "The View," giving no indication of second thoughts about the appearance despite criticism that the president was blowing off international diplomacy in order to take part in the often-fluffy daytime gabfest. 
 
 "I told folks I'm just supposed to be eye candy here for you guys," President Obama said during a back-and-forth about him being the only man on the program. The show's five co-hosts are women. 
 
 The first lady played along by letting the audience in—just a tad—on their relationship and even some of their marital spats. 
 
 "He's very loving, he's very giving. He's very open. He's funny; I'm funnier," Mrs. Obama said when asked to describe her husband's personality. 
 
 Asked whether her husband ever gets angry, she replied: "Yeah, yeah, he does. I can make him mad -- any number of ways." 
 
 "By being thoroughly unreasonable," the president jumped in, smiling, according to a pool report. 
 
 The Obamas also talked about their 20th wedding anniversary falling on Oct. 3—the night of the first presidential debate. President Obama said the couple will celebrate the following Saturday. 
 
 "I like lavishing her with all kinds of attention when she deserves it, and she always deserves it," the president said. 
 
 President Obama also said the couple's daughters, Malia and Sasha, are becoming more independent and no longer seem eager to hang out with their father. 
 
 "They're now at the point where, they still love their daddy, but they come in [to visit him] strategically. They're not being surly or anything," Obama said, while adding that the children now pay about a five-minute visit and then take off. 
 
 "The View" program the Obamas taped Monday is set to air Tuesday, taking the first couple in front of a politically-coveted heavily-female audience six weeks before the November election. 
 
 Read more about: Michelle Obama, 2012 Presidential Campaign, The View ||||| President Obama on Monday flew up to New York from Washington, rode in his motorcade to ABC’s studios and sat down for an interview on “The View.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was not far away, in the Waldorf-Astoria, meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. 
 
 As dozens of world leaders gathered for the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly — choking Manhattan’s streets with motorcades and barricades — the contrast between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton could not have been starker. 
 
 Mr. Obama, his re-election campaign in full swing, continued to make his pitch to American voters, avoiding for the most part world leaders arriving at the United Nations. The president will address the General Assembly on Tuesday but, breaking with tradition, has no meetings set with his counterparts. 
 
 That task he delegated to Mrs. Clinton, who churned through the first of dozens of meetings she will have over the next week. They deal with some of the most pressing foreign policy crises the administration has faced since taking office in 2009, like the deadly protests in the Islamic world and the confrontation between Japan and China over a handful of unpopulated islands. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton met President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan (“It’s been a difficult time for all of us,” he told her after riots protesting a video made in the United States that denigrates the Prophet Muhammad) as well as Mr. Karzai. By the end of a 12-hour day, she had also met with President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, with whom she discussed issues including the security of the American Embassy in Cairo, relations with Israel and Egypt’s economy. 
 
 The meeting seemed to repair possible hard feelings over President Obama’s recent refusal to call Egypt either a friend or an enemy despite decades of close ties. “We moved past that,” a senior administration official said late Monday night. 
 
 Earlier, another administration official said much the same thing about Pakistan, describing Mrs. Clinton’s meeting with Mr. Zardari and Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, as representing a “re-energized dialogue at the highest levels” — if not the very highest level, with Mr. Obama. 
 
 In between, Mrs. Clinton held an emotional meeting with President Mohamed Magariaf of Libya, who reiterated his apologies for the Sept. 11 killings of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. He noted the counterprotests, held in Benghazi and other Libyan cities on Friday, that expressed support for the United States. 
 
 “Madam Secretary,” he said, speaking softly in a conference room at the American suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, “I also seize this opportunity to reaffirm that what happened on 11th of September towards these U.S. citizens does not express in any way the conscience of the Libyan people, their aspirations, their hopes or their sentiments towards the American people.” 
 
 Meanwhile, Mr. Obama was filming a segment for “The View,” the talk show hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and a quartet of sharp-tongued television celebrities. Mr. Obama arrived on the set with a basket of gifts, including home-brewed White House beer for the co-host Barbara Walters, whose birthday is Tuesday. 
 
 With his wife, Michelle Obama, by his side, the president was quipping with the six women in no time: “I told folks I’m just supposed to be eye candy here for you guys.” He chatted about not-so-weighty topics like the first couple’s 20th wedding anniversary on Oct. 3, the night of the first presidential debate with Mitt Romney. 
 
 Mr. Obama said he had wisely decided to celebrate with his wife the following Saturday. 
 
 A moment of foreign policy gravitas occurred when Mr. Obama, asked whether the attack in Libya was an act of terrorism, said: “There’s no doubt that the kind of weapons that were used, the ongoing assault, that it wasn’t just a mob action.” In what may have been a preview of his General Assembly speech, he added: “The overwhelming majority of Muslims, they want the same things that families here want. They want opportunity, kids want an education, they want jobs, they want peace. But there are extremist strains that are there.” 
 
 White House aides, who have been getting an earful for the past few days about the president’s light schedule, sought to focus attention on Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters that Mr. Obama would address anti-American protests that have been unfolding in the Arab world. 
 
 “I would expect the president to address the recent unrest in the Muslim world and the broader context of the democratic transitions of the Arab world,” Mr. Carney said. 
 
 He added that the speech would also give Mr. Obama another opportunity “to underscore that Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.” 
 
 Mr. Obama was scheduled to attend a reception for world leaders at the United Nations on Monday night. But a campaign adviser acknowledged privately that in this election year, campaigning trumped meetings with world leaders. “Look, if he met with one leader, he would have to meet with 10,” the aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ||||| Bloomberg View columnist William Cohan and Democratic strategist Julian Epstein discuss why Mitt Romney is still fumbling for answers over his 2011 tax return – despite their Friday release – and whether he’ll ever be able to explain how he pays for his proposed, across-the-board tax cuts. 
 
 DENVER -- Mitt Romney today attempted to shift focus to what he called President Barack Obama's lack of leadership in the Middle East, as world leaders began to gather in New York City for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. 
 
 The Romney campaign this afternoon offered a series of interviews with major U.S. TV networks, in which Romney hammered Obama for referring to a series of flare-ups in the Middle East as "bumps in the road." 
 
 In Colorado, Mitt Romney insisted to NBC News that he'll win. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has unveiled a new TV ad tying Romney's tax returns with his comments about the 47 percent. NBC's Chuck Todd reports. 
 
 "When the president was speaking about 'bumps in the road' he was talking about the developments in the Middle East, and that includes an assassination. It includes a Muslim Brotherhood individual becoming president of Egypt. It includes Syria being in tumult," Romney told NBC's Peter Alexander. "It includes Iran being on the cusp of nuclear capability. It includes Pakistan being in commotion." 
 
 Mitt Romney will stump in Colorado on Monday and then travel to Ohio via bus tour all ahead of next week's first debate. The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd reports. 
 
 Romney continued, "There are extraordinary events going on in the Middle East, and considering those events, either one of them or all of them collectively, as bumps in the road shows a person who has a very different perspective about world affairs than the perspective I have. I think this is a time for America to exert leadership and this is not something that we are doing in the Middle East ... ." 
 
 Romney was referring to an answer Obama gave in an interview which aired last night on CBS News' "60 Minutes," in which the president defended his support for emerging governments in the Middle East as a result of the Arab spring. 
 
 Charles Dharapak / AP Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney boards his plane in Denver, Monday, Sept. 24, 2012. 
 
 Kroft: Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring? 
 
 Obama: Well, I'd said even at the time that this is going to be a rocky path. The question presumes that somehow we could have stopped this wave of change. I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights, a notion that people have to be able to participate in their own governance. But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because, you know, in a lot of these places, the one organizing principle has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn't been controlled completely by the government. There are strains of extremism, and anti-Americanism, and anti-Western sentiment. And, you know, can be tapped into by demagogues. There will probably be some times where we bump up against some of these countries and have strong disagreements, but I do think that over the long term we are more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with our interests. 
 
 The Romney campaign seized on those comments -- in an attempt to chip away at the president's approval rating on foreign affairs, which slid in the last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll to 49 percent. 
 
 (However, a series of NBC/WSJ/Marist polls in the battleground states of Colorado, Iowa, and Wisconsin show Obama enjoying a double-digit lead over Romney when it comes to who would better handle foreign policy.) 
 
 NBC's Peter Alexander spoke with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Denver about the upcoming debates, world affairs, and if it is possible to change the tone in Washington. 
 
 The Obama White House fired back on Romney, arguing that it was "offensive" to suggest that the president was minimizing the deaths of four Americans in Libya, including the U.S. ambassador there. 
 
 "That assertion is both desperate and offensive," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said. "The president was referring to the transformations in the region, to this process that has -- only began less than two years ago, as we saw in Tunisia, and continues to this day, with remarkable transformations occurring in countries around the region." 
 
 Also in the interview, NBC's Alexander pressed Romney on the current polling that shows him trailing Obama. 
 
 Romney remained defiant. 
 
 "I'm very pleased with the fact that we have a campaign that is taking our message to the people across America, and look --- we're gonna win," Romney said. "There is no question in my mind. We're gonna win." 
 
 NBC's Jordan Frasier contributed to this article.
– And now for something frothy on the campaign trail: President Obama is pretty certain he's "eye candy," at least when it comes to the women on The View. But forget anything serious, ladies. He spent part of his appearance, scheduled to air today, holding hands with the First Lady, notes Politico. Obama shrugged off possible criticisms that he should be attending to international diplomacy with world leaders gathered for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York instead of showing up on The View. "I told folks I'm just supposed to be eye candy here for you guys," Obama quipped to the five female co-hosts. As the show was being taped, Hillary Clinton was in the city meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, notes the Times. But Obama, for the time being, was sticking to family issues, and talked about how Michelle can make him mad "when she's being thoroughly unreasonable," he joked. Someone no doubt making him mad for real was Mitt Romney, who hammered Obama yesterday on the Mideast, particularly on his handling of the lethal attack on the US consulate in Libya earlier this month. "These are not bumps in the road; these are human lives,” Romney said yesterday in Colorado, referring to the president's own words concerning problems in the region. “This is time for a president who will shape events in the Middle East." White House press secretary Jay Carney called the attacks “desperate” and “offensive” attempts by Romney in a race he's losing. Carney might dismiss criticism over Libya, but questions linger.