David Axelrod, chief campaign strategist for President Barack Obama, said today that the Chicago-based operation is preparing to roll out an “extensive” advertising blitz this week defending the president’s first-term record.

Obama officially kicked off his re-election campaign with events in Ohio and Virginia on Saturday, but the president has been giving speeches with political undertones across the country for months. With former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney all but locking up the GOP nomination, however, the Obama campaign is finally ramping up and is apparently ready to use its massive financial war chest to hit the airwaves hard — and soon.

“And in this coming week, you’ll see us unveil an advertising campaign, an extensive advertising campaign, that is very much about where we were and where we’ve come and the things that we’ve accomplished,” Axelrod said on ABC’s “This Week,” before rattling off parts of the president’s record that the campaign will tout.

Among the issues Axelrod highlighted: “the revitalization of the auto industry, the distance we’ve traveled from when we were losing 800,000 jobs a month, the fact that we’re safer today because bin Laden is gone, that the war in Iraq is over and many other things that we’re proud of and that speak to the progress that we’ve made since this president was elected.”

Axelrod, who served both on the president’s 2008 campaign and in his White House, defended the campaign’s approach generally and also specifically on Obama’s use of the assassination of Osama bin Laden as a piece of his national security platform.

“We’re certainly running on our record. You could hear it in the president’s speech yesterday on our record and our vision and our ideas for the future,” Axelrod said. “The Osama bin Laden mission was certainly part of the president’s record, and we are talking about that.”