Blogs

It Begins

By Brian Montopoli

February 20, 2007 / 5:01 PM EST / CBS News

(AP)

Eat The Press points us to the first television ad of the 2008 election: A spot for Mitt "Mormon!" Romney, which will start airing tomorrow in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida. You can see the spot here – on Youtube, naturally. It looks like a pretty typical campaign ad to me, though, for what it's worth, a Romney spokesperson says the "goal was to show Governor Romney unplugged and get people as close to being on the campaign trail with him as you can get." Anyway, brace yourself: Ad season has officially begun. And it's only February. Of 2007. Wow.

By the way, here's the CBSNews.com story. "If the net effect on this is that in a couple weeks Romney's jumped into double digits, he's probably going to move everybody else's time frame up," Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, told CBSNews.com. Fantastic.