Republican Gov. Mark Sanford dipped into the millions of dollars in campaign money he has stashed away and Tuesday launched the first television advertising of his re-election bid.

The ads portray Sanford as a reformer who cut spending, waste and taxes while achieving record job creation.

His opponents wasted no time in deriding the claims.

One ad opens with an announcer saying that Sanford saved taxpayers millions of dollars by barring the state from spending "$800 a night on fancy hotel rooms" and eliminated tens of millions in government waste while cutting taxes for small business and wiping out a budgetary deficit.

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Sanford, pushing his outsider image, says in the 30-second spot, "The Columbia insiders always say we can't change the way things are done. I believe we can."

The second ad focuses on jobs and economic development, the areas in which Sanford has received the most criticism from Democrats and some Republicans.

A business executive notes that his company wouldn't have located in South Carolina "if it were not for Mark Sanford." The announcer then credits Sanford with creating more than 100,000 jobs, "the best jobs recruitment record in 15 years."

The ad credits Sanford with the state's first tort reform law cracking down on frivolous lawsuits, and Sanford says, "The world is changing fast and South Carolina has to keep changing with it."

Each ad ends with a slogan proclaiming Sanford "a different kind of governor."

Rod Shealy, strategist for Oscar Lovelace, Sanford's long-shot primary challenger, said the only true element in the ads is that "Sanford's a different kind of governor."

He dismissed the ads' content as "spin -- and it's not true."

"If it was true, Sanford wouldn't be afraid to debate Oscar Lovelace, if it was true, South Carolina wouldn't be last in every category, if it was true, he wouldn't be the third-worst governor."

Time magazine declared Sanford to be one of the nation's three worst governors.

Joe Werner, spokesman for Florence Mayor Frank Willis, one of two major contenders for the Democratic nomination, said Sanford "clearly has a selective memory. He doesn't cite the third-highest unemployment in the nation; he doesn't cite the lowest per capita income in the country."

Karen Gutmann, spokeswoman for Democratic gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Tommy Moore, said, "They're cherry-picking information, desperately trying to make it look like the governor has accomplished something.

"We could solve South Carolina's unemployment problem if we could hire enough people to go through the numbers (Sanford is) going to throw out, but the working people of South Carolina know the truth because they're living it -- there aren't enough jobs."

The ads cite various governmental reports, enacted legislation and newspaper articles.

Citations accompanying transcripts of the ads cited U.S. Department of Labor statistics showing 1,855,406 people employed in the state in January 2003 when Sanford took office had risen to 1,972,464 by March 2006, "meaning that 117,058 new jobs have been created during the Sanford administration."

The campaign also attributed more job creation to Sanford than in any comparable three-year period since 1991.

The ads reflected strong regional economic growth in the year's first quarter in which South Carolina, at 5.8 percent, trailed only Louisiana's 9.5 percent and Florida's 6.8 percent in the 12-state Southeast.

But unmentioned in the ads was the state's chron- ically high unemployment, which rose slightly in March to 6.5 percent from 6.4 percent in February, according to the state Employment Security Commission. For the same period, the national average declined to 4.7 percent from 4.8 percent.

Jason Miller, Sanford's campaign manager, declined to say how much the campaign spent on the ads.

As for the timing -- seven weeks before the primary -- Miller kept the focus on Democrats and the general election.

An April poll by Survey USA showed Sanford with approval-disapproval rates of 51 percent and 43 percent, respectively. In the poll of 600 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points, 30 percent of Republicans expressed disapproval of Sanford.

Miller said that for the past several months, the Democratic candidates and their allies "have taken all kinds of liberties with Gov. Sanford's record and before those candidates get a chance to distort the facts even further, we thought it would be a good idea to highlight the Sanford administration's extraordinary record on job creation, cutting taxes and reigning in wasteful spending."

Sanford had more than $5 million in available cash as of March 31, according to state Ethics Commission reports. Moore and Willis had $1 million and $1.46 million respectively. A third Democrat, Columbia attorney C. Dennis Aughtry, reported $400.