Obama in Marion, Indiana. (AP)

Washington, April 26: A hardened conservative political operative has launched the first no-holds-barred Republican “attack ad” against Barack Obama, painting him as soft on crime and terror.

Floyd Brown, a veteran of America’s often brutal presidential battles, told The Telegraph that the “Victims” advertisement marked the start of an all-out campaign to portray the expected Democratic nominee as a dangerous liberal.

“Our polling shows that Obama’s positives with many Republican voters are much higher than we think they should be,” he said. “He is the overwhelming favourite for the Democratic nomination and our intention is to give Republicans a true picture of him.”

The 60-second slot relates the fate of three Chicago residents murdered by gangs in 2001. The female narrator then records the opposition of Obama, an Illinois state senator at the time, to expanding the death penalty to cover gang-related murders.

“So the question is: can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?” she asks ominously.

The advertisement was posted online on YouTube and emailed to 7 million conservative supporters last week accompanied by a fundraising appeal for Brown’s National Campaign Fund and its exposeobama.com website.

The on-screen message illustrated the strength of the onslaught that awaits Obama if he secures his party’s nomination.

Deploying his politically-detrimental middle name and a barrage of capital letters, it declared: “What really makes ‘President Barack Hussein Obama’ the scariest four words in the English language is the fact that HE CAN BECOME THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!”