Democrat John Kerry criticizes President Bush’s policies on the economy, the environment and abortion — and appeals for campaign dollars — in three television ads launched Monday on cable channels in five states.
The commercials, which coincide with Earth Day on Thursday and an abortion-rights march in Washington on Sunday, are designed to appeal to core Democratic voters and get them to donate to Kerry’s campaign.
The ads will run for two weeks on cable channels such as CNN, MSNBC, Lifetime and Bravo in heavily Democratic states such as New York, California and New Jersey; Washington state, which Democrat Al Gore won by about 5 percentage points in 2000, and Wisconsin.
The 30-second spots are Kerry’s first on cable. Because they are running only locally, Kerry’s ads will be seen far less than Bush’s cable network ads, which have run nationally since early March.
One Kerry’s ad says “3 million Americans have lost their jobs” under Bush, while another claims that “Bush will appoint anti-choice, anti-privacy justices” and a third argues that the president has “let corporate polluters rewrite our environmental laws.”
All three implore viewers to “contribute now.”
Based on recent government figures, some 1.8 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office.
Steve Schmidt, a Bush campaign spokesman, called the ads “very typical of the Kerry campaign” because they are “relentlessly negative” and filled with “inaccurate attacks.”
“They stand in stark contrast to the president’s optimistic agenda,” Schmidt said.