No Hate in '08?

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About the time the Clinton campaign aired its negative ads in Wisconsin, an American Research Group survey detected erosion in her support and showed her opponent gaining strength in that state. Polls have been very unreliable this election season, and there is no way to tell what role, if any, the ads played in the results.

But one of Clinton's advisers, who requested anonymity, explains why he opposes going negative on Obama: When the campaign has tested negative ads on 18- to 30-year-olds, says the adviser, "They simply assume the candidate is lying about the opponent, and it creates too much blowback that spreads and is not helpful." The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this story.

Learning from Romney's Mistakes

Republican strategists, too, were given pause by Mitt Romney's failure after going negative. Romney first went negative against McCain and Mike Huckabee in December, and doubled down on negative ads in Florida before being eliminated. Romney strategists say now that running attack ads may have hurt the former Massachusetts governor, but that research conducted at the time pointed the other way. While voters reacted predictably to attack ads when they were asked in focus groups, another measure validated the decision, says Romney's director of strategy, Alex Gage. In that test, after seeing attack ads, people were asked what they had read, heard, and seen of Huckabee, for example. Then they were asked if what they had taken in via the ads would make them less likely or more likely to vote for him. "All the research showed it was moving voters away from Huckabee," says Gage.

The question now is whether partisan independent groups will take up the cudgel and become proxies for the candidates. The liberal group MoveOn.org says it will spend as much as $45 million between now and November, much of it on negative ads, including ones that pillory McCain for his stay-the-course position on Iraq. But the conservative group Freedom's Watch, which last year ran $15 million worth of ads aimed at maintaining congressional support for the Iraq occupation, is prepared to spend $250 million this year on ads to defeat antiwar Democrats. Freedom's Watch spent $15 million last summer and fall on TV ads, most of which featured soldiers and parents of fallen soldiers affirming the Iraq mission, rather than trying to strike fear with images of terror attacks.

Freedom's Watch officials say Obama's lack of experience is fair game, but the tone of ads will be more issue-oriented than personal. "You cannot win using the same old tactics, because independent and undecided voters comprise significantly more of the electorate than in past years," says Freedom's Watch spokesman Ed Patru. Winners this year, he says, will be candidates whose messages resonate with "the broad middle."

Could that translate into going positive? Stay tuned.

Kiley is a senior correspondent in BusinessWeek's Detroit bureau .