IN THE 1988 election, when Mr George Bush was being pressed by the Democratic candidate, Mr Mike Dukakis, the Bush campaign released the now notorious "Willie Horton" commercial on television.
Horton was an African American on weekend leave from a Massachusetts prison who kidnapped and raped a white woman. The advertisement implied that Mr Dukakis, then Massachusetts' governor, was to blame.
"Dukakis not only favoured lenient treatment of hardened criminals," viewers were told, "he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes."
The advertisement was factually misleading and appealed to racial prejudices. But it worked. Shortly afterwards, Mr Bush surged ahead in the polls.
The story is retold in a just published book on political advertising, Going Negative, by Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar.
As the 1996 candidates prepare to savage each other on television, the two academics warn that negative attack ads arc turning the voters off and suppressing voter turn out.
They even suggest that negative advertisements pose a serious anti democratic threat, as candidates who might benefit from low voter turn out now deliberately run negative advertisements to shrink the electorate.
The good news is that the researchers found political advertisements to be informative and not as manipulative as might be imagined. Few Democrats are likely to vote Republican, and vice versa, on the basis of negative advertising.
For the next four weeks, the people of New Hampshire will be subject to a blizzard of campaign ads as Republican candidates lock horns in the first primary of the election season. Already the people of this battleground state have been subjected to more television advertising than in any primary campaign in history.
The biggest spender is Mr Steve Forbes, the millionaire publisher, who has spent $7 million on commercials which show himself smiling and Senator Robert Dole scowling while a narrator accuses Mr Dole of supporting Congress pensions at the taxpayers' expense.
"Bob Dole, Washington values, Steve Forbes, conservative values," the message declares.
Senator Dote, the front runner, is showing black and white pictures of himself as a lieutenant in the second World War, while his wife talks about his heroism and injuries.
Flaunting his war wounds is a not so subtle attack on his real enemy, President Clinton, as it reminds viewers that Mr Clinton avoided the draft.
The nastiest ads have been commissioned by the nastiest candidate, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. They show two images of Mr Dole, while a voice says "Remember Senator Straddle. He cut deals and voters rejected him."
The least threatening come from the least threatening challenger, the Governor of Tennessee, Mr Lamar Alexander. These show television monitors running negative advertisements, with Mr Alexander commenting "These candidates act like they're running for president of the fifth grade."
As Time magazine pointed out, he would like viewers to forget he was the first to launch negative commercials, and "his school masterish diction seems designed to appeal to fifth graders, who can't vote in primaries."
The conservative Mr Pat Buchanan, running third in the polls behind Mr Dole and Mr Forbes is no stranger to negative advertising. In 1992, he gave President Bush a dose of his own medicine when he linked him in a commercial with the National Endowment of the Arts, a favourite target of the right.
It showed near naked gay men parading in San Francisco, while a narrator said "The Bush administration has invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art."
His advertisement this time capitalises on his time working as an aide for President Reagan and President Nixon. He declares "Through triumph and tragedy, I have served the two most important presidents of our time."
This "positive" ad has blown up in his face, however, as one of a montage of images he replays shows the 1986 explosion of the Shuttle Challenger. A victim was a New Hampshire teacher, Ms Christa McAuliffe.
Local people are furious. Mr Mike Garrett, assistant principal at Ms McAuliffe's school, accused the candidate of using the tragedy "to tout his personal ambitions". Mr Buchanan said yesterday he was dropping it.
The television landscape after the Republican primaries looks bleak. Over breakfast in Washington last week, the deputy director of the Clinton campaign, Ms Ann Lewis, predicted that the battle would be "mean and dirty".
The President will be able to spend his war chest on ads promoting himself rather than attacking opponents, she said. But the Clinton people learned a hard lesson from the Willie Horton episode. This was that by not responding to the attack, Mr Dukakis appeared ineffectual and indecisive.
Four years later, Republicans tried it again on Bill Clinton, attacking his patriotism and integrity, but they failed because the Democratic candidate fought back. Every criticism was countered within hours by fax and satellite.
In the present poisoned atmosphere, the attack ads are making politicians run scared. They recall the complaint of Senator Howard Baker, who said that as leader in the Senate, when he would try to round up votes on controversial issues, senators would say "Howard, I would like to vote with you but they would kill me with attack ads next time I run."
The killing time is coming around again in American politics.