McCain ad: ‘Worse off than we were four years ago’

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s (Ariz.) latest television ad says that the country is in worse shape now than it was before President Bush began his second term.

“Washington’s broken. John McCain knows it,” the ad says. “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.”

{mosads}The ad, titled “Broken,” shows that McCain is, at least in part, running away from President Bush’s record and looking to win favor with the centrist voters who have supported him in the past.

The ad, which is slated to run in key states, comes after Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) made a point of including images of McCain with Bush in his last two ads hitting the Republican on his energy policy.

The McCain spot, in which a narrator is referring to the Arizona senator as “the original maverick,” makes a special point of saying that McCain “has taken on Big Tobacco, drug companies, fought corruption in both parties.”

“He’ll reform Wall Street, battle Big Oil, make America prosper again,” the ad says.

McCain's pledge to "battle Big Oil" comes on the same day that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) released an ad called "Puppet Masters," which says that McCain dances at the will of the oil companies.

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton responded by saying that “Sen. McCain wants Americans to forget that during the Republican primary, he said that Americans were better off than we were eight years ago, and that he thinks we’ve made ‘great progress economically’.”

Burton added that McCain “wants us to forget that he’s fully embraced the Bush policies he once opposed, and bragged about supporting those policies ‘more than 90 percent of time’.”