Romney campaign and related super PAC plans big TV ad drive in Pa. and 10 other states

Pennsylvania television viewers, you're in for a lively autumn.

Mitt Romney's campaign and the super PAC backing him announced separate and significant ad buys Monday in the Keystone State - the latest in a series expected to blanket the state's airwaves in the 84 days remaining until the presidential election.

The $10.5 million advertising campaign by Restore Our Future, which on Tuesday begins its seven-day run across 11 states in all, is the political action committee's largest expenditure to date. It suggests Republicans still consider Pennsylvania competitive, despite recent polls giving President Obama an edge here and Democratic gains in the state over the last several presidential elections.

The Restore Our Future ad, titled "Another Month," is set to air in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin as well as Pennsylvania, the committee said. How much of the $10.5 million price tag is specifically tied to Pennsylvania was not immediately known.

The spot opens with an announcer intoning, "Another month - even more Americans jobless. If you had President Obama's record, what would you do?"

The scene then shifts to clips of Obama insisting his economic policies have worked and joking about a delay in a stimulus project.

"With no record to run on, it's the only strategy that Obama has left," the spot closes.

Meanwhile, the ad announced Monday by the Romney campaign piled on, asserting the president had taken steps to "gut work-for-welfare" rules that require recipients of public assistance to make progress toward finding or maintaining a job. It is the second Romney spot in as many weeks to take on Obama's welfare record.

Various nonpartisan fact-checking organizations, including PolitiFact, called out an earlier Romney ad on this topic, saying the ad grossly distorted the president's record and implied that Obama sought to completely remove work requirements from the welfare program.

Not to be outdone, the Obama campaign launched a web ad Monday attacking Paul Ryan, just two days after Romney selected the Wisconsin congressman for the No. 2 spot on the Republican ticket.

Ryan, who is chairman of the House Budget Committee and known as a fiscal hawk, has emerged as an advocate of privatizing portions of social-service programs such as Medicare. "It just doesn't make any sense to cut Medicare," says one of several older Floridians featured in the Obama spot. "If we cut it now, what's going to happen to our middle class?"

As of July, Restore Our Future's filings with federal election officials showed the Romney-backing PAC had spent about $1.7 million in Pennsylvania airtime, including $797,000 in the Philadelphia media market, which includes the city, its suburbs and parts of South Jersey.

The Romney campaign's spending topped out at $536,000 in the state over the same period with about half of that concentrated in the Philadelphia market.

By comparison, the Obama campaign and the super PAC backing it, Priorities Action USA, have invested $3.9 million and $923,000 respectively in Pennsylvania airwaves.

As super PACs, Restore Our Future and Priorities Action USA can collect and spend unlimited amounts but cannot coordinate directly with the presidential candidates they support.