Corbett hits July airwaves with jobs ad

Tom Corbett isn’t taking the summer off, either.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf has kept up a busy campaign schedule since winning his party primary in May, and now Pennsylvania’s incumbent Republican governor has rolled out a new 60-second TV ad, which his campaign says will run in every television market in the state.

The spot focuses on job creation, and touts the state’s lowest unemployment level since 2008.

“I don’t want to grow the government. I want to grow industry,” Corbett says in audio which features excerpts from several speeches with stirring music underneath. He also notes that he wants “to pass to the next generation a commonwealth that is debt-free.”

It’s not a bad time for Corbett to try to give his supporters something to smile about, and skeptical voters something new to think about.

A series of independent polls show Corbett trailing Wolf by 20 points or more, and he’s come through the state budget process without getting a budget signed on time, and without any of his major policy initiatives approved, such as pension reform or an overhaul of the state store system.

He notes in the ad, “I didn’t come to Harrisburg to make friends.”

The Wolf campaign has issued a release asserting that Pennsylvania “ranks in the bottom fifth of states measured by percent job growth over the past 12 months,” and is 49th out of 50 going back to January 2011, when Corbett took office.

I promise to take a closer look at the economic debate as the campaign picks up in the fall.

If you’re anxious to dig into the competing claims now, you can read the Corbett ad script and cited sources here, and you can read the Wolf campaign’s rejoinder with their sources here.