Obama Airs First General Election Ad

Barack Obama's first general election advertisement virtually screams its intention from the first line of script: he IS a patriot, damn it, and he has regular guy values and priorities to prove it.

Watch the ad here.

"Country Love" is 60 seconds long and will air in 18 states at a cost to the campaign of, and i'm estimating, more than 1.5 million per week; if he's saturating the airwaves, the figure is closer to $3 million.

The ad will air in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia, per the campaign.

Note the provocative references to welfare reform and tax-cutting.

Here's the script: "OBAMA: I’m Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn’t have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you’d like to be treated. It’s what guided me as I worked my way up – taking jobs and loans to make it through college. It’s what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed. That’s why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected. I approved this message because I’ll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as President, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love."