It is mostly an air war for the presidential race.  Commercial radio and television stations are getting rich from the wall-to-wall election ads this year.  The two major-party candidates and their allies have spent 109 million dollars on Ohio ads – with two weeks to go before the election.

One man trying to keep up with all those ads  is Bob Higgs of the Plain Dealer.  He and a team of about a dozen people manage the Ohio Politifact team that vets political statements and ads.  Higgs appreciates that his paper is large enough to do the work.

“I shudder as we see newspapers losing staff what would happen if that resource wasn’t there because it does a lot of people to do this.”

Higgs says candidates tend to be a little more accurate in their speeches than in their ads. And political action committees with secret donors tend to be the most outrageous.

The U.S. Senate race in Ohio has attracted a record amount of money – most -attacking incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. The Politifact squad gave his challenger, state Treasurer Josh Mandel a “pants on fire“ rating six times. Bob Higgs says the false claims usually come in negative ads.

Maybe negative is positive 

But negative ads serve a purpose, says Richard Perloff,  a professor of communication at Cleveland State University.

“Negativity can really arouse and energize partisans.  If I see negativity against the other candidate it gets me much more energized to campaign and so it that sense negativity is good for the system.”

If it were up to professor Perloff, he’d have Mitt Romney run ads that show him as compassionate, and with his family.  For Mr.Obama, Perloff suggests ads that underscore his experience in a dangerous world – much like Ronald Reagan’s ominous “Bear in the Woods” commercial.  But he does not think the president could get away with Reagan’s optimistic “Morning in America” ad.

“You could get away with a great deal of positivity then that was kind of schmaltzy and only Reagan could do it… because he believed it.”

Perloff says political ads may not work on one’s subconscious quite as well as product ads, but he respects the skill behind them, especially as they’re now sometimes produced in just a matter of hours.

“This is what the money that the PACs and all those, this is what it’s going to.  It’s going to this kind of thing.  I think people are probably right to lament that all the money that’s going into  politics is not going to try to improve the state of our political persuasion, trying to get out the vote; it’s going into the engineering of the psychology of political advertising. “

It may be a good business, says Perloff, but if you lose the election you are out of a job.