New ad features Obama as Specter seeks edge in closely contested race for US Senate in Pa.

New ad features Obama as Specter seeks edge

HARRISBURG, Pa. — President Barack Obama is appearing in a new TV ad to bolster the re-election prospects of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who is in a closely contested primary race in Pennsylvania despite support from the Democratic Party and most labor unions.

The Specter campaign said a new ad airing statewide Tuesday features Obama reminding voters of Specter’s vote for the president’s economic stimulus bill last year.

The 30-second spot shows footage from Obama’s speech at a Specter rally in Philadelphia in September. Obama touts Specter’s “deciding vote in favor of a recovery act that has helped pull us back from the brink” and says Specter “came to fight for the working men and women of Pennsylvania.”

The primary is May 18.

Specter, a longtime centrist who is seeking sixth term in the Senate, is campaigning as a Democrat for the first time after switching his party registration last year.

Specter’s challenger, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, bills himself as the real Democrat in the race, saying Specter left the GOP to preserve his Senate job and can’t be trusted to support Obama. The president is simply holding up his end of the bargain he made to support Specter if he switched to the Democratic Party, Sestak said.

“I don’t begrudge him for keeping his end of the deal with Arlen Specter. … I know in his heart of hearts he really wants a true Democrat” to win the race, Sestak said at a campaign event in Harrisburg on Tuesday.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that Obama has no plans to make another campaign visit to Pennsylvania for Specter before the election.

He cites Specter’s support for the policies of former President George W. Bush, including the Iraq war and the 2001 tax cut that many Democrats derided as a giveaway to the wealthy.

Specter switched parties after GOP anger over his February 2009 vote for the stimulus bill led him to the conclusion that he was unlikely to win a Republican Party primary. Specter was the only Republican in Congress facing a 2010 re-election to support the stimulus.

He has said he believed the nation would have slipped into a depression without the injection of nearly $800 billion in federal money into the economy.

Campaign finance reports released Tuesday showed Specter with $5.8 million heading into the final three weeks before the primary; Sestak had $2.9 million. Combined, they spent more than $6 million in April as each candidate began running TV ads.

Associated Press writer Erica Werner in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.