Rick Santorum's presidential campaign has just put up one of the cleverest ads of 2012. (Of course, we're only less than two months into the year.)
The humorous ad called "Rombo", intended to inoculate Santorum in Michigan and elsewhere against the expected bombardment of negative ads from Mitt Romney and his superPAC allies, shows a Romney lookalike with a mud-filled paint-gun stalking and shooting at a cardboard cutout of Santorum in an empty warehouse. The fake Romney misses every time. An excerpt of the ad's copy:
"Mitt Romney's negative attack machine is back at full throttle. This time Romney's firing his mud at Rick Santorum. Romney and his superPAC have spent a staggering $20 million brutally attacking fellow Republicans..."
(h/t Politico's Mike Allen on the ad.)
Meanwhile, , the pro-Romney superPAC, has a new ad of the very sort Santorum hopes to neutralize as the contest for the Republican presidential nomination heads towards primaries in Michigan and Arizona at the end of the month. An excerpt from the anti-Santorum ad:
"How did Rick Santorum actually vote? Santorum voted to raise the debt ceiling five times. And for billions of wasteful projects, including the 'bridge to nowhere'..."
The ad even tries to link Santorum with Hillary Clinton, saying they both as U.S. senators voted to let convicted felons vote.
That recycled charge is one that PolitiFact found to be misleading and half false since Santorum actually voted to restore voting rights to those who had already served their sentence, not imprisoned convicts.
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