Obama to be most expensive prez nominee: reports

Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 4:10 am

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is all set to break the advertising expenses record in a election set by President George W Bush, a media report said today (October 18).

Based on his current spending, Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), a service that monitors political advertising, predicts Obama’s advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million Bush spent in his 2004 campaign by early next week.

With advertisements running unabatedly on all local and national broadcast networks and even on video games and his own dedicated satellite channels, the Democrat nominee is out-advertising his Republican rival McCain nationwide by a ratio of at least 4-to-1, the New York Times said, citing CMAG.

The huge gap has been made possible by Obama’s decision to opt out of the federal campaign finance system, which provides presidential nominees $84 million in public money and prohibits them from spending any amount above that from their party convention to Election Day.

McCain, however, is participating in the system. Obama, who has earlier promised to participate in it, is expected to announce in the next few days that he has raised more than $100 million in September, a figure that would shatter fund-raising records. John McCain has spent $91 million on advertising since he clinched his party’s nomination, several months before Obama clinched his.

While Obama has held a spending advantage throughout the campaign, his television dominance has become most apparent in the last few weeks, the paper said, adding that he has gone on a buying binge of TV time that has allowed him to swamp McCain’s campaign with concurrent lines of positive and negative messages.

The most recent analysis of the presidential advertisements by the University of Wisconsin, for the period from September 28 to October 4, found that nearly 100 per cent of McCain’s commercials included an attack on Obama, while only 34 per cent of Obama’s advertisements, which were more focused on promoting his agenda, included an attack on McCain.

“This is uncharted territory. We’ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we’ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage,” Kenneth M Goldstein, Director of Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin said.

( This post is from an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by APakistanNews.Com.)

Obama to be most expensive prez nominee: reports

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