President Barack Obama’s biggest disappointment of the last four years is not being able to change the climate in Washington, even as he has brought change to the nation. 
 
 “My biggest disappointment is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked,” Obama said in an interview with Steve Kroft that aired Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” 
 
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 reset Obama on 'tone' in Washington Romney on leadership 
 
 A sit-down with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney also aired on the show. That interview was conducted by Scott Pelley. 
 
 “I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem-solving that, you know, I haven’t fully accomplished that. Haven’t even come close in some cases,” the president added in his interview. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Obama pulling ahead of Romney) 
 
 Obama’s comments aired after he said last week that, over the course of his presidency, he’s learned “you can’t change Washington from the inside,” but with the help of people across the country. 
 
 He hit on that theme in Sunday’s interview, acknowledging that he “bear[s] responsibility for everything, to some degree” including not bringing change to the political process. But, he said, “One of the things I’ve realized over the last two years is that that only happens if I’m enlisting the American people much more aggressively than I did the first two years.” 
 
 Still, “change has happened and positive change for the American people,” Obama said, pointing to the passage of his health care law and reforms to the financial services industry. 
 
 On Thursday, Obama said that not passing immigration reform was the “biggest failure” of his term. As soon as Obama’s comments aired Sunday night, Republicans latched onto the president’s discussion of his “biggest disappointment,” with Romney spokesman Ryan Williams saying that the president “just doesn’t get it.” Obama’s “greatest failure – by far – is his broken promise to fix the economy,” Williams said. 
 
 Romney, meanwhile, indicated that he would try to get Washington to work by starting negotiations with something short of all the details of his vision. 
 
 “If you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don’t hand them a complete document and say, ‘Here, take this or leave it,’” he said. “Look, leadership is not a take-it-or-leave-it thing. We’ve seen too much of that in Washington.” 
 
 When pressed to go into details on his tax plans, Romney deferred. “That’s something Congress and I will have to work out together,” he said. Though “the devil’s in the details” on taxes, “the angel is in the policy, which is creating more jobs.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: GOP analysis: Mitt winning in middle) 
 
 Under his plan, all tax rates would be cut by 20 percent, Romney said, but because most exemptions and deductions would be eliminated, most Americans would wind up paying about the same in taxes that they do now. “Middle-income people will probably see a little break, because there’ll be no tax on their savings,” he said. 
 
 It’s fair, Romney said, for people like him to pay rates below 15 percent on investment income. “I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth — to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work,” he said. ||||| 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 ||||| WASHINGTON -- Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured. 
 
 "Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. 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." 
 
 This constitutes a dramatic reversal in position for Romney, who passed a universal health care law in Massachusetts, in part, to eliminate the costs incurred when the uninsured show up in emergency rooms for care. Indeed, in both his book and in high-profile interviews during the campaign, Romney has touted his achievement in stamping out these inefficiencies while arguing that the same thing should be done at the national level. 
 
 And while Romney refused to agree on Sunday that the government's role is to ensure that every American has health care, he has endorsed such an idea in the past. 
 
 When asked in a March 2010 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether he believes in universal coverage, Romney said, "Oh, sure." 
 
 "Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and 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, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said. 
 
 Watch Romney on "Morning Joe" in 2010: 
 
 And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get "free care" in emergency rooms "a form of socialism." 
 
 "When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is," he said at the time. "So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance ... or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism." 
 
 Getting rid of high numbers of inefficient emergency room visits was actually a key goal of Romney's health care reform in Massachusetts, as he noted in his book "No Apology": 
 
 After about a year of looking at data -- and not making much progress -- we had a collective epiphany of sorts, an obvious one, as important observations often are: the people in Massachusetts who didn't have health insurance were, in fact, already receiving health care. Under federal law, hospitals had to stabilize and treat people who arrived at their emergency rooms with acute conditions. And our state's hospitals were offering even more assistance than the federal government required. That meant that someone was already paying for the cost of treating people who didn't have health insurance. If we could get our hands on that money, and therefore redirect it to help the uninsured buy insurance instead and obtain treatment in the way that the vast majority of individuals did -- before acute conditions developed -- the cost of insuring everyone in the state might not be as expensive as I had feared. 
 
 In the "60 Minutes" interview, Romney stressed that each state should address the problem of the uninsured through different means. But he didn't speak with the same alarm about the cost of emergency room care. 
 
 "Again, different states have different ways of doing that," Romney responded. "Some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn't take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, 'You've got to take the Massachusetts model.'" 
 
 Romney's efforts to limit emergency room care in Massachusetts were largely successful. 
 
 Six years after he signed health reform into law, visits to emergency rooms in Massachusetts are decreasing and the state has the highest rate of residents with health insurance.
– 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.