This post is part of our guest series from Inkwell Strategies analyzing the 2012 campaign ad war.

As the 2012 ad war heats up, political action committees are starting to get in on the action. Case in point, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS just announced a major ad buy targeting President Obama in several key battleground states.

Looking past the GOP primaries to a tough general election, the ad, entitled The Two Presidents, knocks Obama on tax policy. Unlike many of the campaign ads we’ve highlighted to date — which are produced primarily to garner free media coverage — this is a major buy. Crossroads is spending $2.6 million to run the ad in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Colorado — all states the president carried in 2008.

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A new Public Policy Polling survey shows Newt Gingrich taking the lead in the GOP presidential race.

Gingrich leads with 28%, followed by Herman Cain at 25% and Mitt Romney at 18%.

The rest of the field: Rick Perry at 6%, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul at 5%, Jon Huntsman at 3%, and Gary Johnson and Rick Santorum each at 1%.

Key findings: “Gingrich’s lead caps an amazing comeback he’s made over the last 5
months.  In June his favorability nationally with Republican voters
plummeted all the way to 36/49. Now he’s at 68/23, representing a 58
point improvement in his spread since then. As recently as August
Gingrich was mired in single digits at 7%, and even in September he was
at just 10%.  He’s climbed 18 points in less than 2 months.”

A new survey from The Polling Company (R) in Iowa finds Herman Cain leading the GOP presidential field with 20%, followed by Newt Gingrich at 19%, Mitt Romney at 14% and Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul at 10%.

All other candidates were under 5% with another 13% of likely voters still undecided.

Donald Trump told Fox News he would make an endorsement in the presidential race very soon.

Said Trump: “Within a month probably sounds good — maybe a little bit more than that, but I’ve got a good, good sight on everybody. I have a lot of respect for a lot of them. We have some good people.”

Despite Rick Perry’s string of poor debate performances and sinking poll numbers, Jay Newton-Small thinks it would be foolish to count him out just yet.

“In fact, there is still a path for him to win… Money. Perry’s campaign on Friday announced a $1 million ad buy on Fox News… Despite the defection of some bundlers, Perry remains a fundraising powerhouse who will be able to afford investments other candidates can’t… If he backs out now, it’s so much worse. You can’t run for president and then not give it your all. If Perry walks away now, before every last option is exhausted, he’ll bear the quitter label for the rest of his life… Perry is improving: he’s more comfortable on stage, more confident. Maybe he knows he’s now got nothing to lose. His brain-freeze comedy tour was successful and if he can start really engaging and delivering, he might just catch a wave… Perry still has more endorsements than anyone else but Romney, including some in key states like South Carolina. Plus, he has the strong backing of his wife and family… If Gingrich gets knocked off, there’s time for one, maybe two more waves before the first voting begins. Perry still has a window to the nomination if he can win Iowa and ride that momentum through South Carolina and into Florida.”

That said, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has Perry fading to just 4% support nationally among Republican voters.

President Obama’s top political operatives met with Bill Clinton to ask for his help on how to win re-election, Joe Conason reports.

“As the meeting began, the Obama aides laid out their sense of the political landscape, their polling data on attitudes among voters in the Democratic base and independents who might be truly undecided, the shaping of their message and their campaign’s organizational structure across the country… Much of the presentation dealt with battleground states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, and Arizona, where Obama prevailed four years ago but faces more difficult odds next year.”

“Having absorbed all this information, Clinton peppered the Obama operatives with dozens of probing questions and specific suggestions, not only concerning their strategy and message but how to handle the leading Republican candidates, too. Economic conditions and how to address them dominated the discussion. What most interested the Obama team were Clinton’s insights on heartland voting blocs that remain in the political middle: Not the Republican-leaning independents who always end up voting for the GOP nominee, but the truly uncommitted who largely ended up supporting Obama in 2008.”

The Note: “Though the pace of the new stories about it has dropped off, Gloria Allred, the lawyer for one of the accusers, plans to hold a press conference in Louisiana this afternoon with the former boyfriend of Sharon Bialek, who recently came forward with her story about Cain’s misconduct.”

“The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is.”

— Herman Cain, in a GQ interview.

Al Hunt notes the similarities between President Obama and Mitt Romney:

“They are super smart men, who quickly absorb data, policy wonks able to analyze complicated choices. Also, in a business that places a premium on personal and political relations, neither relishes that sort of camaraderie or cajoling; they both appear aloof and spend little quality time with fellow politicians.”

“There are profound differences between these two likely 2012 nominees… Yet in style and brain power there are surprising similarities. They both are graduates of Harvard Law School… Rhetoric aside, both are more comfortable with compromise and consensus than confrontation.”

Alexander Burns: “It’s a weird quirk of the political marketplace that in a
political environment as unstable and change-hungry as this one, the
opposition party appears set to put forward a nominee who looks in many
respects like a center-right version of the incumbent.”

A new Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll shows that against a generic, unnamed Republican challenger, President Obama tied 43 to 43.

“But when voters were pushed to pick between Obama and the GOP front-runner, Mitt Romney, the president took a 6-percentage-point lead. Obama beat Herman Cain by 9 percentage points in the survey, conducted last week as new revelations about sexual harassment allegations against the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO continued to trickle out.”

Notes Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: “Generic Republicans never flip-flopped on a position and never had any problems in their personal life. When it’s a choice, we’re in a much, much stronger position.”

NBC will announce that it has hired Chelsea Clinton to become a full-time special correspondent for NBC News, the New York Times reports.

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows the “week of turmoil” in the race for the Republican presidential race has benefited Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich while hurting Rick Perry and Herman Cain.

Romney leads the race with 32%, followed by Cain at 27%, Gingrich at 22%, Paul at 9%, Perry at 4%, Bachmann at 2%, Santorum at 2% and Hunstman at 1%.

With just nine days remaining for the supercommittee to find $1.2 trillion in debt reduction over the next ten years, The Hill notes that the tone of some of the members is cause for concern.

Sen.
Pat Toomey (R-PA), a member of the committee, said in an interview,
“It’s at a difficult point. I think we’ve got a ways to go, but I hope
we can close that gap.” Meanwhile, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), another
member, said that his confidence was diminishing.

Meanwhile, The New York Times
reports that the supercommittee may kick the can down the road
and “decide on the amount of new revenue to be raised but would leave it
to the tax-writing committees of Congress,” the House Ways and Means
Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, “to fill in details next
year, well beyond the Nov. 23 deadline… That would put off painful
political decisions but ensure that the debate over deficit reduction
stretched into the election year.”

Spending time in Tennessee is apparently working for Herman Cain: A new Vanderbilt poll shows him leading the GOP field in the state with 22%, followed by Mitt Romney at 12%, Rick Perry at 9%, Michele Bachmann at 6%, Newt Gingrich at 6% and Ron Paul at 6%.

Rich Galen explains how Newt Gingrich can win the GOP presidential nomination.

“The two candidates who are stable in their numbers are Romney (with a ceiling of about 25 percent of GOP voters) and Ron Paul (who will stay between six and 10 percent). That leaves about 65 percent of Republican voters looking for a home. Cain will continue to drift downward (my words, not Newt’s); Santorum, Huntsman, and Bachman are, and will continue to be minor players.”

“So, Newt’s thinking goes, he doesn’t need to beat Romney — he needs to consolidate the non-Romney vote and he’s the only one who can do that.”

An example from recent history: “Sixty-two percent of Iowa voters wanted someone other than Barack Obama four years ago. The only reason he won was because Hillary and Edwards almost precisely split 60 percent of the votes.”