The conservative super-PAC backed by former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove announced Tuesday that it would purchase $11 million in television commercials this week, their largest one-week buy of the election, in a new campaign slamming President Obama's jobs record.
The significant ad buy from American Crossroads comes on top of an additional $1 million radio buy and a $4 million television campaign targeting U.S. Senate races in North Dakota, Florida, Virginia and Montana, the group reported Tuesday. The Senate ads will be funded by Crossroads GPS, an affiliated political advocacy organization.
"Obama's weak leadership has yielded weak results and a weaker America. Staying on Obama’s course means a weaker America every day," Crossorads Chairman Steven Law, a former Bush administration official, said in a statement.
The anti-Obama commercial is airing in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia, and features a man comparing projections of the unemployment rate to where it stands today. The group is notably not running the ad in Wisconsin, though Restore Our Future, another GOP outside group, has been running ads there in recent weeks.
"This is what President Obama promised the jobless rate would be if we passed the stimulus: 5.6 percent. But this is what the jobless rate actually is: 8.1 percent. The difference? About 3.7 million jobs," says a man standing on an empty warehouse floor in front of a graph of the unemployment rate. "Obama's spending drove us $5 trillion deeper in debt, and now we have fewer jobs than when he started."
Obama's campaign fired back.
"President Obama promised to create jobs and strengthen the middle class and he has. While there's still work to do, Karl Rove's new ad ignores reality –— businesses have created nearly 5.1 million new jobs over the past 30 months, and we've cut our deficit by $1 trillion, which is part of the president's balanced plan to reduce it by more than $4 trillion," Obama spokesman Danny Kanner said in a statement. "But what Mitt Romney’s promising is more huge tax cuts for multi-millionaires and billionaires that will require him to raise taxes on the middle class or explode the deficit."
This post was last updated at 11:45 a.m.
