Here in a nutshell (where it belongs) is my understanding of the tactics behind negative campaigning.
Once a campaign goes negative, it relies on the media to pick up the negative tone of the campaign and report on it thoroughly.
For instance, let's say we make an add saying that Candidate A is psychotic. The first cycle is the release of the ad itself. The second cycle is the response from Candidate A to the attack add. The third cycle is the media picking up on the negative tone and spreading the message farther than the message ever would have gone by itself.
This is how I think McCain's negative strategy could pay off. His attacks are vile and low. His campaign's accusations about Obama are the actions of people who have no patriotism.
This makes great news. The pundits pick up the message, repeat the commercials (for free) over and over again, and this subsequently gives the commercial a far larger audience than it ever would have gotten before.
With this strategy, money in the campaign chest is not nearly as important as the ability to send "shock and awe". After all, why spend the money getting a commercial in all the major markets when you can create one horrifying commercial, release it only a few times, and then let the major news outlets run it constantly for free while providing commentary.
It doesn't matter at all what the talking heads say before or after the commercial. The commercial itself is created to be far more visually stimulating than the news around it, and therefore the message of the ad dominates the dialogue around it.
This is how negative campaigning wins. It wins over time. This is why polls which show that voters don't respond well to negative ads are not terribly accurate: they poll the people just after the ad is released, rather than much later after the message has spread via the MSM and has the chance to impact the voter's decisions. The immediate impact of a negative ad will always produce distaste. However, negative ads are created to fit into news cycles, where endless discussion of the ad itself allows the message to seep into the national dalogue.
News agencies report conflict... it's their job. After all, the news cannot spend their time talking about everyone who WASN'T murdered the previous night. Negative ads produce conflict and therefore makes great news. It gives the pundits the chance to shake their heads sadly and bemoan the state of the campaign, while at the same time it allows the Republicans a chance to control the direction of the news and to get their hate messages out "on the cheap".
Is there anything that can be done? Is this one of the narrow victory scenarios that McCain is looking for? Is this the reason why the Republicans are continuing the negative attacks despite the lack of short-term success? Could someone please talk me down?