politics

WASHINGTON - They raise money through text messages and release videos directly to the Internet, but Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are relying on the old-fashioned U.S. Postal Service to deliver that staple of a presidential campaign's final days: the attack ad.

During the past month, the two presidential campaigns and their allies have bombarded voters in swing states with one contemptuous brochure after the next. A review of direct-mail advertisements sent on behalf of Obama or McCain documents a below-the-radar battle in which the public message of the candidates becomes something more spiteful, more exaggerated and often more ominous.

Several state Democratic Party committees are sending glossy, colored 8- by 11-inch mailings that show the torso of man in a pinstriped suit reaching into an inside pocket. "He's Hiding Something He Doesn't Want us to Know," the headline says. The flip side criticizes McCain's health care plan. Similarly, the Republican National Committee (RNC) sent mail to a half-dozen swing states adorned with the slogan: "Barack Obama: Not who you think he is."

McCain and Obama disparage the opposing side's attacks as unfair even as they approve more mailings of their own because direct mail has a 30-year history of swaying voters late in elections. By targeting brochures to specific kinds of voters in specific neighborhoods, politicians free themselves from the burdens of advertising to a mass audience on television, marketing and campaign experts said. Such ads can be more negative. They can be more alarmist.

"It's really a matter of 'the more emotional you are, the more rabid you are; the more extreme you are, the better it will work,'" said Richard Armstrong, a political-advertising expert who wrote a book about direct mail.

Direct mail has influenced political campaigns ever since Richard Viguerie started compiling mailing lists by hand for conservative groups in the late 1960s, and its influence has grown steadily. In the past 20 years, experts said, direct-mail campaigning has become predominantly negative because candidates find it less damaging to their image to make attacks through the mail than on TV.

So, in a campaign where few advertisements have qualified as glamorous -- a study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project showed McCain's ads are 74 percent negative, compared with 60 percent of Obama's -- direct mail has turned particularly ugly.

"The one advantage is you can get a really nasty piece of mail into the household, and it may well be passed around," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "Letters are rare enough now that people actually look at them."

In one mailing, the RNC sent a flier to voters in Virginia and Missouri that depicts the nose of an airplane inched next to the glass exterior of a building. The brochure warns: "Terrorists don't care who they hurt," but "Barack Obama think terrorists just need a good talking to." When a reporter asked McCain about the ad last week, he said he "absolutely" supports it and thinks it revealed one of his opponent's shortcomings.

Obama decided to send the terrorist ad to his network of supporters Thursday morning. In a mass e-mail, Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, included a picture of the ad and requested that Democrats donate $25 to Obama's campaign to "push back." He included a link to a page on the Obama website that read: "John McCain is trying to win this election by scaring voters with truly vile attacks. ... "

But Democrats have traveled a similar path. According to Democratic mailings, McCain is a "disaster for health care" and an opponent of equal working rights for women. The AFL-CIO, which supports Obama, has sent more than 57 million pieces of political mail during this campaign in an effort it refers to as the "largest and most targeted" in its history.

"If you use direct mail the right way, it can be four or fives times more influential than ever," said Mike Podhorzer, the deputy political director for AFL-CIO who oversees the mailing program.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.