By Jim Rutenberg
Saturday, October 18, 2008
PHILADELPHIA: Barack Obama is days away from breaking the $188 million advertising spending record set by President George W. Bush in his re-election campaign in 2004, having unleashed an advertising campaign of a scale and complexity unrivaled in the television era.
With advertisements day and night, on local stations and on the major broadcast networks, on niche cable networks and even on video games and his own dedicated satellite channels, Obama, the Democratic candidate, is now running at least four times as much advertising nationwide as his Republican rival, John McCain, according to CMAG, a service that monitors political advertising. That difference is even larger in several closely contested states.
The huge gap has been made possible by Obama's decision to opt out of the federal campaign finance system, which gives presidential nominees a dollar for every dollar they raise but limits to $84 million the amount they can spend between their party convention and Election Day. McCain is participating in the system.
Obama, who at one point promised to participate in it before changing his mind, is expected to announce in the next few days that he raised more than $100 million in September alone, a figure that would shatter previous monthly fund-raising records.
"This is uncharted territory," said Kenneth Goldstein, director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin. "We've certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we've never seen in a presidential race once side having such a lopsided advantage."
While Obama's decision to forgo the matching funds - and the limits that come with them - has given him a spending advantage throughout the election, his television dominance has become most apparent in the past few weeks as he has gone on a buying binge that has allowed him to utterly swamp McCain's campaign with concurrent lines of positive and negative messages.
The Obama campaign's advertising approach - which has included ads of up to two minutes long in which Obama positively lays out his agenda, and even ads in video games like "Guitar Hero" - has helped mask some of his rougher attacks on his rival.
"What Obama is doing is being his own good cop and bad cop," said Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of CMAG, who calls the ad war "a blowout" in Obama's favor.
Here in Philadelphia, the biggest media market in a critical battleground state, the two candidates have run a mix of positive and negative ads.
During "Doctor Phil" on the CBS affiliate here, Obama showed a minute-long, positive commercial recounting, "One of my earliest memories: going with grandfather to see some of the astronauts, being brought back after a splashdown, sitting on his shoulders and waving a little American flag."
But, minutes earlier, during the late-afternoon news on the NBC station, Obama had banged McCain for a health care plan that an announcer alleges, "could leave you hanging by a thread."
Toward the end of the 4 p.m. newscast on the local CBS station, McCain ran a positive spot, a rarity for his campaign, which has shifted nearly 100 percent to negative ads. McCain spoke directly into the camera and told viewers, "The last eight years haven't worked very well, have they?" He promises, "I have a plan for a new direction for the economy."
An ad on the local NBC affiliate was more typical, trying to tie Obama to Tony Rezko, a Chicago real estate developer convicted of fraud. That spot was a co-sponsored by the Republican National Committee, which is allowed to split half the costs with McCain on an unlimited number of advertisements, helping him to double the number of ads he can buy.
McCain has used such advertisements to keep up with Obama's advertising in vital cities like this one, where the campaigns have combined to spend the most during the general election. But such ads come with a caveat: they must include a reference to congressional issues and leaders, making the message generally less direct. The spot with Rezko also shows pictures of two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank.
But for every city like Philadelphia, in a state McCain views as important to his chances for victory in November, there are those like Miami, Washington and Chicago, where Obama has often been able to run advertisements nearly unopposed.
Republicans have begun a blitz of automated telephone calls attacking Obama. But by law, the Republican Party's independent advertising unit cannot coordinate with the party leadership or McCain's campaign, meaning it is not always in line with McCain's campaign message. A smattering of outside groups are running hard-charging ads against Obama, but he has the money to immediately meet those attacks with spots directly addressing their charges.
Now spending almost as much as he can in local television markets, Obama has increased his advertising on the broadcast television networks, including during National Football League games and soap operas.
"They're doing the networks because they've saturated these markets and they're looking for more time," Tracey of CMAG said.
On Oct. 12, Obama bought so heavily during NFL games and the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that, according to CMAG, he spent $6.5 million on a day when McCain spent less than $1 million.
Based on current spending, CMAG predicts that Obama's general-election advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million Bush spent on his in 2004 campaign early in the coming week. McCain has spent $91 million on advertising.
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