Obama camp announces new Latino ad push in Colorado

UPDATE: YouTube Spanish-language video of Obama ad invoking Rush Limbaugh against John McCain below the fold.

The campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is starting to target the three Southwestern swing states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico in an Spanish-language advertising drive of “historical” proportions.

UPDATE: Here is one of the Spanish-language TV spots. That Washington Post has a roundup of what the ad says for non-Spanish speakers.

That’s according to Federico Peña, former Denver mayor and national co-chair of the Obama campaign, who announced today that the campaign will start airing a number of Spanish television and radio spots in the three states on issues like the economy and immigration as part of an unprecedented $20 million Latino outreach initiative announced by the Obama camp in July.

Although campaign officials haven’t released the ads on YouTube or the Web yet, the spots are designed to counter recent Spanish TV broadcasts by Republican candidate John McCain released in battleground states like Colorado that accuse Obama of balking on immigration reform.

One pro-Obama spot will focus on depicting McCain as folding under the influence of radical anti-immigrant figures like Rush Limbaugh on immigration reform legislation, according to campaign staff who talked about the media buys on a conference call today.

“None of us are taking any vote for granted,” Peña said about the Obama campaign’s Latino outreach strategy in swing states, which involves heavy dependence on advertisements along with voter registration and mobilization.

As for Colorado, “there has never been this kind of effort on the part of Democrats or Republicans” to reach out to Latinos, Peña said of the new spots, although he added the campaign was not willing to release the exact money it was spending on the ads.

The Obama campaign is continuing to run on the front range in Denver and El Paso County as well as on the more rural Western Slope area in the state.

Erin Rosa was born in Spain and raised in Colorado Springs. She is a freelance writer currently living in Denver. Rosa's work has been featured in a variety of news outlets including the Huffington Post, Democracy Now!, and the Rocky Mountain Chronicle, an alternative-weekly in Northern Colorado where she worked as a columnist covering the state legislature. Rosa has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for her reporting on lobbying and woman's health issues. She was also tapped with a rare honorable mention award by the Newspaper Guild-CWA's David S. Barr Award in 2008--only the second such honor conferred in its nine-year history--for her investigative series covering the federal government's Supermax prison in the state. Rosa covers the labor community, corrections, immigration and government transparency matters. She can be reached at erosa@www.coloradoindependent.com.

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