Amodei opens campaign with debt ad

The message is provocative and the visuals may be a bit cheesy -- the Chinese Army marching on the U.S. Capitol! -- but Mark Amodei has staked out an opening issue of his congressional campaign.

The former chairman of the Nevada Republican Party focuses on the debt limit in his first television ad (view video below) after being picked Saturday by the GOP Central Committee to run for the vacant U.S. House seat in the 2nd District.

The 30-second spot opens with a fake Chinese news anchor relating how "our great empire rose again" when the United States kept borrowing money from China to feed its spending until "their independence became a new dependence."

The narration plays over images of padlocked factory gates, President Barack Obama presumably signing debt bills into law, the dollar sign turning into the yuan symbol, the Chinese flag flying over skyscapers and, in the end, Obama bowing to Chinese leader Hu Jintao as the Chinese Army marches on the Capitol grounds.

Chinese language captions dot the 30-second ad as music plays in the background. Yu Lin, a Washington-based reporter and cameraman for the official Xinhua News Agency, said the song is the military anthem of the People's Liberation Army.

The captions, he said, are in traditional Chinese. The message, running in a loop, translates to "The Big Debt," "America became its own worst enemy," Our Great Empire Rose Again."

Says Amodei at the ad's tagline: "I'll never vote to raise Obama's debt limit."

Amodei's campaign said the 30-second ad was to start running Monday in Reno. It did not say how much airtime was bought and for how long the ad would run.

Zach Hudson, communications director for the Nevada State Democratic Party, said, "I did not see anything in that ad that mentioned jobs, and nothing that mentioned Nevada."

Andrew Davey, a progressive blogger from Henderson, called the ad "xenophobic."

Amodei "clearly hasn't received the memo from the great titans of Nevada industry," Davey said, such as Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson who operate casinos in the Chinese territory of Macau, and as the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority plans to open an office in China.

Democrats are set for Saturday to nominate their candidate for the 2nd Congressional District seat, with the party's establishment backing state Treasurer Kate Marshall.

Yu said the Amodei spot was reminiscent of "Chinese Professor", which was sponsored by Citizens Against Government Waste and ran during the U.S. mid-term elections last year.