Billionaire investor Joe Ricketts is pushing ahead with a plan to spend $10 million on an ad campaign supporting Mitt Romney, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, despite a controversy earlier this year surrounding a New York Times report that Ricketts was considering a series of racially tinged ads featuring President Obama’s former pastor.
The ad campaign will launch this week, marking one of the biggest efforts by an individual in the 2012 election cycle. The spots will feature disillusioned Obama supporters discussing why they are planning to back Romney, according to the Journal.
In May, the Times published a story reporting that Ricketts’ super PAC, the Ending Spending Action fund, had been presented with a proposal suggesting a $10 million campaign to attack Obama with a series of ads featuring his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The president of the super PAC dismissed the plan as “merely a proposal” that “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects.”
Ricketts, who founded the company that became online brokerage TD Ameritrade Inc. and whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, will also spend an additional $2 million to back Republicans running for Congress.
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