This approach may rob your media advisor of his creativity and give your staff less satisfaction than a blood-drenched negative, but it will work far better.

Tony Schwartz, my mentor, once told me that he would read me two identical ads that would elicit totally different reactions:

Ad One: "You can read the truth about the pornography industry in a three-part series in The New York Times."

Ad Two: "You can read the truth about the pornography industry in a three-part series in the National Enquirer."

Of course, these are totally different ads, but the difference is in the mind of the listener. The impartial, just-the-facts approach to negative advertising passes the internal screens voters have on ad credibility and does its work inside the voters' mind. And the adjectives they would use to describe Obama's programs to themselves are far, far more devastating than the ones your ad person can conceive.