Romney Super-PAC Blasts Obama With $20 Million in Attack Ads

On Tuesday, the super-PAC devoted to electing Mitt Romney, Restore Our Future, unveiled its biggest-ever ad assault on President Obama. The group will spend $20.1 million on anti-Obama ads between Tuesday and Election Day, an amount that is believed to be the largest single-race ad buy by a super-PAC.

The ads accuse Obama of having “flatlined” the American economy in his first term in office, and tell voters the president will do the same with a second term. “If you don’t jump-start America’s economy now, your economy stays dead four more years,” the narrator says. “Demand better.” (View that ad above.) Restore Our Future’s new blitz comes after the super-PAC dropped $17.7 million on ads in the past week, bringing its spending to nearly $40 million in the last two weeks of the presidential race.

Here’s the transcript for “Flatline”:

If you saw this line in the ER, you’d be panicked.

Well, this flatline is Barack Obama’s economy.

23 million looking for full-time work. Middle-class incomes falling. Spending and debt exploding.

And Obama’s second term agenda is the same as the first.

If you don’t jump-start America’s economy now, your economy stays dead four more years.

Demand better.

Restore Our Future is responsible for the content of this message.

Restore Our Future’s new ads will run in battleground states (with maybe one exception, Michigan), and nationally. Here’s the breakdown: Colorado ($880,000), Iowa ($1.4 million), Maine’s 2nd congressional district ($490,000), Michigan ($2.2 million), Nevada ($1.3 million), Ohio ($2.4 million), Pennsylvania ($2.1 million), Virginia ($2.8 million), and Wisconsin ($1.6 million). Five million more in ads will run nationally, the super-PAC says in a press release.

Restore Our Future is the king of super-PACs. The group has raised $132 million for the 2012 elections, more than any other super-PAC; its top donors include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, Texas energy executive Harold Simmons, and Oxbow Carbon CEO Bill Koch, the brother of billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate