http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1575
By Jim Meyers
The political operative behind the Willie Horton ad that helped defeat http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4232 in the 1988 presidential race is releasing a new ad this week targeting Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama.
Floyd Brown, a longtime conservative strategist who heads the conservative National Campaign Fund, said he is launching the ad to expose Obama’s weakness on gang http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=145.
“The ad draws a parallel between Obama’s weakness on http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4264 violence and the war on terror,” said Brown. Brown is the former head of Citizens United, which claims to be the largest political action group for conservatives in the United States.
In his new ad Brown tells of a woman leaving church choir practice who was killed by gang gunfire while shielding her 6-year-old daughter, a 15-year-old boy beaten with bricks after a gang member crashed into his car, and a 14-year-old boy shot five times in the back for refusing to flash a gang hand sign.
“They all died in 2001. In http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2838,” the voice-over declares. That same year, Barack Obama — then an Illinois state senator — voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders, the ad points out.
The ad concludes, “When the time came to get tough, Obama chose to be weak. So the question is: Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?”
Brown says the ad will run in targeted states beginning on Tuesday.
During the early part of Barack Obama’s political career he opposed the death penalty. In recent years, however, he has modified his position to
support the death penalty in cases involving the “most heinous” of crimes.
In 2001 as an Ilinois State Senator, Obama did vote against a proposed law that would have widened the scope of the death penalty to include some gang activity. The bill passed the legislature but was later vetoed by then Republican Governor George Ryan, who imposed a moratorium on death penalty executions.
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