MANCHESTER, N.H. — Mitt Romney is the target, abortion is the issue, and the $100,000 ad buy will change the tone of the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential primaries.
This weekend marks the first negative TV advertising in the two early-voting states as the campaign headed into the critical weeks before the first voting, with an independent group's claim that the former Massachusetts governor has flip-flopped - a sometimes crippling charge in presidential politics. Analysts say similar negative ads are likely against his chief GOP rival, Rudy Giuliani, whose positions on gun control and immigration are markedly different from those he espoused as New York mayor.
The anti-Romney ad campaign, by a Republican group that supports abortion rights, is fairly modest in scope. But it may open the door to bigger ad buys targeting other candidates and topics, several campaign veterans said.
"This will be the beginning of it," said Patrick Griffin, a Manchester-based advertising executive who handled President Bush's 2000 media effort in New Hampshire.
Given the pending ad against Romney and the confrontational tenor of Wednesday's Republican debate in Florida, Griffin said, the top campaigns must be ready to launch hard-hitting ads the instant they decide the benefits outweigh the risks. "You can be sure there are scripts written and, very likely, spots produced," he said.
And if not television, then radio. On Thursday, a Republican group that advocates for gay rights launched a 60-second anti-Romney radio ad criticizing his tax record.
Negative ads are certainly possible in the Democratic contest as well. But strategists say they are not surprised to see them first in the Republican race, where front-runners Romney and Giuliani have left a long evidentiary trail of their changed positions on key issues.
"It's a target-rich environment for negative ads," said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.
Accusations of flip-flopping have animated campaigns for years. They proved especially damaging to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004, and they have dogged Romney and Giuliani this year.
Thus far the accusations have arisen only in debates and news accounts, not in potentially powerful TV ads that often employ ominous music and grainy black-and-white or slow-motion images. And while campaign ads have saturated the Iowa and New Hampshire airwaves for weeks, they have been mostly upbeat, biographical spots.
That will change this weekend when the group Republican Majority for Choice starts its ads - in Iowa and New Hampshire newspapers and TV spots - calling Romney a flip-flopper on abortion.
The ads' potential impact is unclear. Romney repeatedly has acknowledged being an outspoken supporter of abortion rights until he changed his mind a few years ago.
"I don't know how many times I can tell it: I was wrong," he said in Wednesday's debate. Voters seeking candidates who are "not willing to admit they're ever wrong," he said, will "have to find somebody else."