Sen. Barack Obama's campaign laid out a list of 18 battleground states earlier this summer, and spent money advertising in each.

But the new Obama ad released just now will only run in 16 states. Seems red states Georgia and Indiana have been dropped from the list.

However, the campaign is still running other ads in those states and Sen. John McCain has run zero ads in Georgia.

McCain leads by an average of 7 points in Georgia, a Southern state that Obama campaign manager David Plouffe had said could be competitive, especially given native Bob Barr's candidacy on the Libertarian ticket.

In Indiana, the Real Clear Politics composite has Obama up by 0.5.

Here's "Book," which features more Bush-McCain tie-ins.

The 18 states the campaign considered battlegrounds for ads earlier this summer:

Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia

And the states Team Obama said today would see the new ad:

AK, CO, FL, IA, MI, MO, MT, NM, NV, NH, NC, ND, OH, PA, VA, and WI.

UPDATE: Team McCain responds by saying Obama has voted in "lockstep" with President Bush on energy:

"In the Senate, Barack Obama has voted in lockstep with President George W. Bush nearly half the time, including the Bush-Cheney Energy bill which gave close to 3 billion dollars in new giveaways to Big Oil – a terrible policy that John McCain opposed.  The truth is Barack Obama’s plan is a job killing machine that ignores the struggling economy and raises taxes on family savings, social security and small businesses."

— Christina Bellantoni, national political reporter,
The Washington Times

Bookmark my blog at http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/bellantoni

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