U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet has launched his re-election air-offensive in the state’s largest television markets, and his first ad says a lot about the strategy he has adopted for the early campaign.

The 30-second spot features lowing beef cattle in corrals somewhere in blue-sky high-plains Colorado. The ad is upbeat and informative. Bennet opens and closes the commercial. He appears in a blue-checked western shirt and jeans. In the opening, he walks smiling before a row of cattle and delivers a laugh line. That opening bit runs four seconds. Bennet closes the ad smiling again and delivering another laugh line. Altogether, he appears onscreen for about seven seconds.

The ad celebrates Bennet’s successful effort to quash ill-conceived “Washington regulations” that would have prevented beer brewers in Colorado from selling spent grain to farmers to be used for feed.

“Senator Bennet knew that made no sense,” says Bryan Simpson, who is billed simply as a brewery worker. “So (Bennet) stepped in and stood up for Colorado. Michael Bennet knew this was good for workers, good for customers and good for farmers, too.”

The ad began airing in the Denver and Colorado Springs markets Thursday, April 7, which also happens to be National Beer Day.

The ad raises the curtain on an early messaging effort to highlight Bennet’s record of accomplishing things despite the gridlock that has gripped Washington and infuriated the public.

It also signals that Bennet learned something valuable from former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s 2014 failed reelection effort.

Udall came out of the gate that year with a dark TV ad attacking now-Sen. Cory Gardner. The Udall ad is about Gardner’s record opposing full reproductive-health choices for women. Melancholy piano music runs behind a grim voiceover. Still photos of Udall appear on the screen. He never says a word to viewers. In hindsight the ad encapsulates everything wrong about the Udall campaign. It focused on Gardner. It was negative. Udall didn’t take the time to re-introduce himself to voters.

Bennet’s ad is positive. It’s about him and his talent for achieving things. The former high-powered Anschutz Investments manager, Denver schools superintendent, chief of staff for then-Mayor Hickenlooper and Yale law school graduate is clearly working to present himself as a good man to have on your side and also a down-home Coloradan. The spent-grains intervention in Washington worked. The western shirt on the plains looks good.

The ad also shows off the fact that Bennet can raise cash. No word yet on the size of the ad buy, but Bennet has plenty to spend. At the end of last quarter he was sitting on $6.7 million cash on hand.

That kind of money will be tough for most of the rough dozen Republican candidates now running in the U.S. Senate primary to compete against, wealthy businessman Robert Blaha excepted. In 2012, Blaha spent nearly $800,000 of his own money in a failed bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn.

A last note on the Bennet ad: There’s a shot near the end of New Belgium beer drinkers ostensibly toasting Bennet’s can-do effectiveness. They’re lined up at a bar, all shoulders and heads. The shot is a mirror image of the lowing cattle from the opening sequence lined up at the spent-grain feed trough. The parallel is clearly unintentional and funny for that reason and clumsy in the messaging department.

— john@coloradostatesman.com