TITLE: “America’s Leadership.”
LENGTH: 30 seconds
AIRING: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia.
SCRIPT: Barack Obama to a gathering of voters: “We are a beacon of light around the world. At least that’s what we can be again. That’s what we should be again.”
Obama: “The single most important national security threat that we face is nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. What I did was reach out to Senator Dick Lugar, a Republican, to help lock down loose nuclear weapons. We have to lead the entire world to reduce that threat.”
Obama at town hall: “We can restore America’s leadership in the world.”
Obama: “I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.”
KEY IMAGES: Men, women and children listen to Obama speak in an intimate town hall setting. One woman nods approvingly. Obama addresses an off-camera interviewer and as he speaks the screen fills with a black-and-white photograph of two bearded men and a small pile of shoulder fired rockets and Kalashnikov rifles. That is followed by an image of Obama sitting beside Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., then with Lugar as the two lawmakers toured weapons stockpiles in the former Soviet Union. The ad concludes with Obama again speaking to voters.
ANALYSIS: Obama placed this commercial into his ad rotation in 18 states to complement a major speech Tuesday on national security. Obama is devoting a great deal of attention to national security, illustrating his campaign’s recognition that Republican rival John McCain stands even or slightly ahead of Obama on that topic with the public. Obama wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times Monday describing his plans for the war in Iraq. The speech Tuesday touched on that war, the conflict in Afghanistan, the threat posed by Iran and the potential access by terrorists to nuclear weapons.
In 2005, Lugar, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Obama traveled to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan to examine the former Soviet Union’s stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Lugar and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., were the authors of legislation in 1991 to provide money and expertise to those countries to safeguard and dismantle those stockpiles and their delivery systems.
Obama and Lugar teamed up to sponsor legislation to expand the Nunn-Lugar effort to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year.
Lugar has been a leading force in the Senate on nonproliferation issues, often working across party lines to win support for legislation.
By invoking Lugar’s name, Obama is portraying himself as a Democrat willing to work in bipartisan fashion and is aligning himself with a respected foreign policy figure in the Senate.
Lugar on Tuesday dismissed any suggestion that he would cross party lines to run with Obama. “I would simply say the ad is accurate. I’ve made no attempt to suggest or censor ads run by Democratic candidates for office. I’m pleased that we had the association that Sen. Obama described.”
———
Analysis by Associated Press Writer Jim Kuhnhenn
