Crossroads announcing $25 million ad push

PHILIP ELLIOTT Associated Press Published:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An independent group favoring Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney is launching a $25 million, monthlong advertising campaign in 10 states against President Barack Obama, further escalating an expensive TV ad war in presidential battlegrounds six months before Election Day.

Crossroads GPS plans to open the effort Thursday by spending $8 million on a TV ad that castigates Obama on the economy by using his own words against him.

"We need solutions, not just promises," says a 60-second commercial that's to run in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.



Obama, Romney and their allies are in a rush to define each other negatively in voters' eyes before Americans tune out during the summer. And already both sides are going for the jugular, a sign of a sharply negative race between now and November.

Crossroads GPS' ad push is the latest to illustrate the degree to which this presidential campaign is playing out under dramatically looser campaign finance laws in the wake of a series of Supreme Court decisions that allowed independent groups to raise and spend unlimited donations as long as they don't coordinate directly with the campaigns they support.

It also comes at a time when several other Republican-leaning super PACs have been spending millions on ads in key states to tear down Obama while Romney -- the underfunded challenger to the record-shattering Democratic president -- focuses on raising money after a primary season that left him broke and battered.


On the Democratic side, Obama's campaign has launched its own $25 million, month-long ad push in the most competitive general election states. In recent days, it's started going after Romney's business credentials, specifically his time at the helm of the private equity firm Bain Capital. The campaign was running an ad Wednesday on the matter but in just a handful of states and at a very low price tag, just under $100,000.

But the real money to promote the same message was coming from a pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action. It's spending $4 million to air its new ad, which is remarkably similar to the one from the Obama campaign. Both highlight the failure of GST Steel, a Kansas City, Mo.-based company purchased by Bain Capital that went bankrupt and laid off 750 workers in 2001.



But the president's edge is minimized by the campaign cash raised by Republican-leaning super PACs.



While the Republican groups legally can't coordinate directly with the Romney campaign, they do coordinate with each other. Leaders of some leading Republican super PACs attend a monthly meeting hosted by Crossroads to share information and devise strategy to deny Obama a second term. That may mean, for example, taking turns ensuring Romney has a presence on the air -- or, rather, the Republican criticisms against Obama are aired -- even if his campaign itself can't afford to run its own ads yet.





"Candidate-specific super PACs are simply arms of the presidential campaigns and need to be treated as such and be subject to contribution limits," said Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, a campaign finance reform advocacy group. "The idea that these groups are independent is a fiction in reality terms and, we believe, a fiction in legal terms."



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