Behind the Ad: Obama highlights Romney's integrity issues

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: The Obama/Biden Campaign.

Where: Nine key states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia).

What's going on: The Obama Campaign is running two spots in key states. The first one criticizes Romney for his failure to cut taxes or create jobs. The strategy is to highlight promises Romney made and failed to keep.

As RealClearPolitics describes it:

"Mitt Romney did cut taxes -- on millionaires like himself," says the narrator in one ad, titled "Mosaic." "But he raised taxes and fees on everyone else." The spot cites fee hikes on health care, school bus rides, nursing homes and other services.

The Obama camp had been hitting Romney's private-equity career, but that approach came under fire, even from some prominent Democrats. Last month, the re-election team shifted its focus to Romney's record as governor. The strategy now is to highlight promises they say Romney didn't keep, suggesting that he won't deliver on presidential campaign pledges either.

The second ad, called "Come and Go," touches on Romney's time at Bain Capital and as governor of Massachusetts.

"As a corporate raider, he shipped jobs to China and Mexico. As governor, he did the same thing -- outsourcing state jobs to India," the narrator says. "Now he is making the same pitch." Both spots end with the tagline: "Romney economics: didn't work then; won't work now."

Part of the difficulty with following politics closely is that after hearing the same thing over and over you get numb. It's important to remember that over the next several months a lot of people are going to start paying attention to Mitt Romney for the first time. If the general theme of the Obama campaign is that Romney has said a lot of things over his career, made a lot of promises, but changes positions whenever he feels the need, they may get that from these ads.

If that's the point, I guess they do the job. As for myself, I'm already getting bored.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)