The Obama campaign is hitting the airwaves with a $1.4 million ad buy in an effort to defend the president’s controversial "green" energy agenda, USA Today reports:
An analysis of campaign advertising shows the intensity of the Obama campaign's response to attacks on the administration's energy record last month.
The Obama campaign dumped 5,000 ads into 25 swing-state markets Jan. 19-25, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which analyzes political ad spending. That's about 33 ads daily in each television market.
It's unusual for an incumbent to run campaign ads 10 months before the election, particularly in such volume, says David Pesci of the Wesleyan project. "He's either being very aggressive or he's more nervous than they're talking about."
According to the Department of Energy website, the Obama administration has given out more than $35 billion in taxpayer backed loans to "green" companies, creating a total of just 62,016 jobs.
ABC News fact checks the Obama ad here:
The "unprecedented" line comes from a statement by a coalition of government watchdogs in 2009, just three months after Obama took office, who referred specifically to steps pledged early on to boost transparency and end the "revolving door" of former lobbyists becoming presidential appointees.
Since that time, however, Obama has appointed two former lobbyists to posts inside his administration, including most recently Cecilia Munoz to be his chief domestic policy adviser. Politifact – the nonpartisan fact checking group — calls this a "broken promise" by Obama.
As for 15 other ethics and transparency-related campaign promises, hailed by the watchdogs in the early days of the administration, Politifact reports a mixed bag of results. Obama’s promises to ban gifts from lobbyists to executive branch employees, release more government records, and increase protections for whistleblowers, for example, have been deemed "kept."