Obama targets middle-class voters through airwaves

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts Gov. Mitt Rom­ney speaks at a town hall-style meet­ing in Euclid, Mon­day. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

KEN THOMAS, STEVE PEOPLES

Asso­ci­ated Press

EUCLID — Tar­get­ing middle-class vot­ers, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on Mon­day unveiled a sweep­ing $25 mil­lion, nine-state ad cam­paign whose cen­ter­piece is a com­mer­cial por­tray­ing him as the stew­ard of an eco­nomic come­back and con­fronting Repub­li­can crit­i­cism that recov­ery has sput­tered on his watch.

“We’re not there yet,” the ad says. “It’s still too hard, for too many. But we’re com­ing back. Because America’s great­ness comes from a strong mid­dle class. Because you don’t quit, and nei­ther does he.”

Coun­ter­ing from hard-hit Ohio, Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney argued that Obama’s poli­cies are squeez­ing middle-income Amer­i­cans and that his busi­ness back­ground could help jump­start the economy.

“The pres­i­dent and I have fairly dif­fer­ent visions for what it’ll take to get Amer­ica work­ing again,” the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor said.

The com­pet­ing eco­nomic visions — and the huge Obama invest­ment in TV adver­tis­ing in bat­tle­ground states — are shap­ing a White House race that new sur­veys sug­gest is com­pet­i­tive six months before Elec­tion Day. A poll of vot­ers in a dozen swing states by USA Today and Gallup found Obama and Rom­ney essen­tially even among reg­is­tered vot­ers — Obama 47 per­cent, Rom­ney 45 percent.

Just weeks old, the Obama-Romney race is play­ing out in a coun­try in which unem­ploy­ment is hov­er­ing around 8 per­cent and where many vot­ers are not feel­ing growth that econ­o­mists insist is occurring

Monday’s announce­ment of the new adver­tis­ing effort came just days after Obama opened the lat­est phase in his White House re-election effort with a pair of ral­lies in polit­i­cally impor­tant Vir­ginia and Ohio.

The sheer scope of the ad effort — $25 mil­lion in one month in the bat­tle­grounds of Vir­ginia, Penn­syl­va­nia, Ohio, Nevada, New Hamp­shire, Iowa, North Car­olina, Florida and Col­orado — illus­trates the huge advan­tage the incum­bent Demo­c­rat has over Rom­ney. Obama is tap­ping into a cam­paign bank account of more than $100 mil­lion to pay for his big open­ing salvo in the TV ad wars while Rom­ney scur­ries to catch up after a costly and con­tentious pri­mary sea­son. The pre­sump­tive GOP nom­i­nee is rely­ing on out­side groups — like the pro-Romney Restore Our Future polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee — to keep him com­pet­i­tive on the air against Obama’s behe­moth campaign.

Liberal-leaning groups were get­ting a boost of their own from bil­lion­aire financier George Soros, whose staff told sup­port­ers Mon­day that he would be donat­ing $1 mil­lion to the advo­cacy group Amer­ica Votes and another $1 mil­lion to the super PAC Amer­i­can Bridge 21st Cen­tury. Amer­i­can Bridge is a research group that sup­ports Obama’s re-election effort.

In the 60-second ad, Obama tries to paint a pic­ture of a nation turn­ing the page on a dif­fi­cult decade.

The ad traces America’s eco­nomic land­scape from late 2008 and the mas­sive eco­nomic down­turn that crip­pled the U.S. econ­omy, with hous­ing fore­clo­sures, job losses and the finan­cial cri­sis. “The econ­omy spi­ral­ing down … all before this pres­i­dent took the oath,” it says. “Some said our best days were behind us. But not him.”

“He believed in us, fought for us,” the ad says as it high­lights jobs being cre­ated, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the mas­ter­mind of the 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks, and the return of U.S. troops from a lengthy war in Iraq in Obama’s first term.

It could be con­sid­ered Obama’s take on Pres­i­dent Ronald Reagan’s patri­otic “Morn­ing in Amer­ica” theme, yet with a gritty under­tone. It jux­ta­poses images of unem­ployed work­ers and home fore­clo­sure signs with work­ers assem­bling cars, a girl jump­ing into the arms of her sol­dier father and a woman work­ing behind a cash reg­is­ter. But, despite the opti­mistic tone, the ad over­looks the chal­lenges Obama faces in sell­ing the mes­sage that the econ­omy is improving.

Eco­nomic data released last week show his hur­dles. The econ­omy added just 115,000 jobs in April, far below monthly totals from Decem­ber 2011 through Feb­ru­ary 2012 when the econ­omy grew at a faster pace. While the unem­ploy­ment rate inched down to 8.1 per­cent, the decline was largely attrib­uted to more peo­ple who had stopped look­ing for work. Peo­ple who are no longer look­ing for jobs are not counted as unemployed.

By empha­siz­ing Obama’s record, the new ad showed that Obama’s advis­ers rec­og­nize he can’t win a sec­ond term sim­ply by attack­ing Romney’s record in busi­ness and as Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor. Instead, the ads are aimed at mak­ing a com­pelling case that despite the eco­nomic hard­ships faced by mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, Obama is the best over­seer of the economy.

The adver­tis­ing push includes large ad buys in mul­ti­ple mar­kets in Florida, Ohio, North Car­olina and Col­orado, and will cover a num­ber of 30-second and 60-second spots run­ning into early June.

In a con­fer­ence call with reporters, David Axel­rod, a senior adviser to the Obama cam­paign, said the cam­paign would devote its May adver­tis­ing to a pos­i­tive mes­sage tout­ing Obama’s accom­plish­ments but was pre­pared to respond to crit­i­cism from “the Karl and Koch broth­ers’ con­tract killers over there in super PAC land.”

It was a ref­er­ence to out­side groups linked to Karl Rove, a for­mer adviser to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, and the heads of Koch Indus­tries, long­time sup­port­ers of con­ser­v­a­tive causes. Obama has responded to a hand­ful of crit­i­cal ads in recent months with his own defen­sive spots, and Axel­rod crit­i­cized the GOP-leaning groups even though the White House has sig­naled to Demo­c­ra­tic donors that they too should donate to Democratic-leaning super PACs.

While Obama let his cam­paign ad shape the race Mon­day, Rom­ney headed to sub­ur­ban Cleve­land. He soft­ened his tone at times, shar­ing the sto­ries of strug­gling Amer­i­cans he’s met on the cam­paign trail and coun­ter­ing the notion that he came from a priv­i­leged back­ground. He said his father, a for­mer auto exec­u­tive, never had the time or money to get a col­lege degree and his par­ents “couldn’t afford a fancy hon­ey­moon” when they married.

Dur­ing Romney’s town hall meet­ing, a woman said in a ques­tion to Rom­ney that Obama had strayed from the prin­ci­ples of the Con­sti­tu­tion and “should be tried for trea­son.” Rom­ney did not respond to her sug­ges­tion of trea­son but told reporters later that “no, of course” the pres­i­dent should not be tried for such an offense.

On Tues­day he was head­ing to Michi­gan, the state where he grew up and has iden­ti­fied as a poten­tial Repub­li­can pickup, and on Wednes­day to Col­orado, where Obama staged the 2008 Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion and cap­tured elec­toral votes a few months later. He was to visit the state cap­i­tals of Lans­ing and Denver.

Rom­ney, the expected GOP nom­i­nee, was expected to add more del­e­gates to his haul from Tuesday’s pri­maries in North Car­olina, Indi­ana and West Vir­ginia. He has 856 del­e­gates, accord­ing to The Asso­ci­ated Press’ count, nearly 300 del­e­gates short of the 1,144 needed to win the nomination.

Obama, for his part, was tak­ing his eco­nomic mes­sage to events in Albany, N.Y., on Tues­day, and Reno, Nev., on Fri­day. He also was hold­ing fundrais­ers later in the week in Seat­tle and Los Ange­les, where he was attend­ing a high-dollar din­ner at the home of actor George Clooney.

Posted by AP News on May 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.