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November 26, 2011
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Inside the debate halls, the clash may be Republican versus Republican. But offstage, conservatives are mounting a unified and expensive air assault on the candidates’ common opponent: President Obama.
Nearly a year before Election Day, Republican presidential candidates and conservative action groups are already spending heavily on television advertising aimed at casting Mr. Obama as a failure.
Their tactics, the aggressive and sometimes misleading kind not typically used until much further along in a campaign season, have led to a spat with Democrats in what is shaping up to be the most costly election advertising war yet.
In an advertisement from Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that is now running on national cable television, Mr. Perry looks directly into the camera and declares: “Obama’s socialist policies are bankrupting America. We must stop him now.”
A new commercial from Mitt Romney that ran last week in New Hampshire displays a litany of depressing assertions about the economy. “Greatest jobs crisis since Great Depression. Record home foreclosures. Record national debt.” And it renders judgment on Mr. Obama’s presidency: “He promised he would fix the economy. He failed.”
In the past six months, conservative groups like those affiliated with Karl Rove and the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers, and, increasingly, Republican candidates themselves, have spent more than $13 million on advertisements carrying a negative message about Mr. Obama, according to an analysis by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.
And it is only going to grow more intense.
“These dollar figures we’re talking about now are going to seem quaint in a few months,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, president of the analysis group. “And they’ll seem really quaint in eight or nine months.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us...ften.html?_r=1
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Inside the debate halls, the clash may be Republican versus Republican. But offstage, conservatives are mounting a unified and expensive air assault on the candidates’ common opponent: President Obama.
Nearly a year before Election Day, Republican presidential candidates and conservative action groups are already spending heavily on television advertising aimed at casting Mr. Obama as a failure.
Their tactics, the aggressive and sometimes misleading kind not typically used until much further along in a campaign season, have led to a spat with Democrats in what is shaping up to be the most costly election advertising war yet.
In an advertisement from Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that is now running on national cable television, Mr. Perry looks directly into the camera and declares: “Obama’s socialist policies are bankrupting America. We must stop him now.”
A new commercial from Mitt Romney that ran last week in New Hampshire displays a litany of depressing assertions about the economy. “Greatest jobs crisis since Great Depression. Record home foreclosures. Record national debt.” And it renders judgment on Mr. Obama’s presidency: “He promised he would fix the economy. He failed.”
In the past six months, conservative groups like those affiliated with Karl Rove and the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers, and, increasingly, Republican candidates themselves, have spent more than $13 million on advertisements carrying a negative message about Mr. Obama, according to an analysis by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.
And it is only going to grow more intense.
“These dollar figures we’re talking about now are going to seem quaint in a few months,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, president of the analysis group. “And they’ll seem really quaint in eight or nine months.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us...ften.html?_r=1
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