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Rove super-PAC launches $25 million swing-state ad blitz

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8xAlxKV-w (embedded)]

By Jonathan Easley - 05/16/12 08:51 AM ET

Karl Rove’s super-PAC Crossroads GPS is launching a $25 million ad campaign on Thursday in 10 battleground states that will be critical to determining the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.

The month-long campaign will open with an ad hitting President Obama for what it says are broken promises on the economy, a Republican ad tracker confirmed to The Hill.

"We must help the millions of homeowners who are facing foreclosure," Obama says in a campaign speech from 2008.

“Promise broken,” text from the ad reads. “One in five mortgages are still under water.”

The ads will play in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia — all states that Obama won in 2008 that the GOP hopes to reclaim.

Republican-affiliated super-PACs have had a massive fundraising advantage so far in the election cycle, with Rove’s Crossroads GPS saying it could spend up to $300 million in the cycle, and Mitt Romney’s affiliated super-PAC, as well as groups backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, with hundreds of millions at their disposal.

The president was reluctant to embrace super-PACs in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, but reversed course in February. The largest donations to Democratic-backed super-PACs in the cycle have been a $1 million contribution from comedian Bill Maher, and $2 million pledged by financier George Soros.

Still, the Democratic super-PAC Priorities USA released an ad on Monday attacking Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital in a multimillion-dollar buy that is running in the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado.

© 2012 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

http://thehill.com/video/campaign/227679-rove-super-pac-launches-25-million-swing-state-ad-campaign [with comments]