The morning after President Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign dropped a trio of new TV ads in Virginia.
They come as part of the campaign’s broader launch of 15 new TV ads titled “A Better Future” that will run in eight battleground states. Virginia is the only state that has three of the ads running, according to the campaign.
In Virginia, the spots focus on defense cuts, energy and families. (The defense ad is above and you can see the energy adhere and the third ad here.)
Each ad opens with Romney saying “This president can ask us to be patient, this president can tell us it was someone else’s fault, but this president can not tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office.”
The narrator follows with, “Here in Virginia, we’re not better off under President Obama.”
One ad says the “war on coal, gas and oil is crushing energy and manufacturing jobs” and that Romney’s plan is to “repeal Obama’s excessive regulations” and foster innovation. Another, focused on defense, says the president’s defense cuts would weaken national security and threaten more than 130,000 jobs.
The 130,000 figure comes from analysis conducted for the Aerospace Industries Association by Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University, and Richmond-based Chmura Economics & Analytics. The study says defense-heavy Virginia ranks second only to California in estimated job losses from automatic spending cuts slated to take effect in January if Congress doesn’t act to avoid the reductions.
A measure passed in the summer of 2011 increased the nation’s debt limit and set up a bipartisan commission to devise a plan to find $1.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years, but the commission was unable to agree.
Now, the president and Congress must agree on a plan to make the cuts; otherwise, the reductions will automatically begin Jan. 2. The military faces a reduction of nearly $500 billion over a decade, and domestic spending would also face a steep decline over a decade.
