WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 — Last week, Senator Barack Obama’s chief strategist lamented that he had only 14 seconds of video from what his presidential campaign believes to be a moment of political gold: Mr. Obama’s 2002 speech against the Iraq war just nine days before Congress, with support from several of his primary campaign opponents, authorized the invasion.
On Thursday, it seemed that the strategist, David Axelrod, had found a solution when the Obama campaign released an Internet advertisement that featured crystal-clear audio of the speech. In the advertisement, Mr. Obama’s voice played as the screen flashed photographs of Mr. Obama and fire-and-brimstone images of war.
But, campaign officials said late Thursday, the audio excerpt was not from the actual speech, but was a recently recorded version of it.
In Mr. Obama’s new spot, the screen flashes “Federal Plaza, Chicago, October 2, 2002,” before Mr. Obama is heard reciting 20 seconds of the speech in which he declared his opposition to the war.
In early October, when Mr. Obama’s campaign had an event commemorating the speech, Mr. Axelrod was quoted in The Chicago Tribune as lamenting that he had only 14 seconds of video from the original address. The video, from a local television station, is grainy with less than pristine sound, and Mr. Axelrod said he was pining for his own, full copy.
“I would kill for that,” he was quoted as saying. “No one realized at the time that it would be a historic thing.”
Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman, said Mr. Obama had reread the speech for use in the advertisement recently and addressed it with a joke.
“The last time Barack recorded an audio version of his written words he won a Grammy,” Mr. Burton said, “so he thought he’d give it another shot.” Mr. Obama won a Grammy Award in 2006 for the audiobook version of “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir he wrote in 1995.
Mr. Obama’s strategists are not the first to employ technology in the service of a campaign spot.
In 2003, the Republican National Committee admitted it had digitally enhanced audio of President Bush in a campaign commercial by editing out some verbal stumbling in his State of the Union address that year.
