Following a corruption scandal that led Boeing to lose a $23 billion contract to build tanker jets for the US Air Force, its European competitor EADS has its best chance ever of cracking the US market. To win the deal and other chunks of the $400 billion US defense market, the European company is putting on an American face.
Sammy Pence's ad would please a lot of Americans. He stands in front of a helicopter painted in red, white and blue and he's wearing a Stetson. Pence once served in the Marines, he has a ranch where he raises cattle and he hails from Texas. It wouldn't be hard to imagine him as one of the people who just helped George W. Bush score his second term in the White House.
Problem is, Pence is the poster boy for a foreign company that, in competing for lucrative American defense contracts, is pitting itself directly against American companies that have been carefully promoted by the Bush administration. Neither Boeing, General Dynamics nor Lockheed Martin organized the patriotic advertising campaign. Pence works and promotes the Franco-German aerospace giant EADS.
The Europeans are currently in the process of a complete image make-over in the United States. EADS is trying to endear itself with the political elite in Washington in order to secure a chunk of the close to $400 billion a year the Pentagon and Congress allocate for national defense. And it's staging a massive lobbying campaign to achieve that goal.
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