Mitt Romney, in his struggle to wrap up the 2012 Republican nomination for the Presidency, has presented himself as an outsider. During an exchange with Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, at a recent Republican debate, Romney declared that “to get this country out of the mess it’s in” Americans need leaders “from outside Washington, outside K Street.” One television ad by Romney supporters makes the same argument against Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, calling him “the ultimate Washington insider” while showing his face in front of an image of the Capitol dome.

Larry McCarthy is considered a master of the negative TV ad. Illustration by Jimmy Turrell

Romney, unlike the remaining Republican candidates, has served no time in Washington. Yet he’s relying on a media offensive managed by operatives who have long been at the heart of Washington’s Republican attack machine. One of the leaders of this advertising war is Larry McCarthy, a veteran media consultant best known for creating the racially charged “Willie Horton ad,” which, in 1988, helped sink Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for President.

McCarthy, who is fifty-nine, helps direct the pro-Romney group Restore Our Future, one of the hundreds of new Super PACs—technically independent political-action committees set up by supporters of the candidates—that are dramatically reshaping the Presidential election. PACs have existed since the nineteen-forties, but for decades an individual donation was limited to five thousand dollars. The power of PACs increased exponentially in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals could spend without limit—and pool their money in PACs—to influence elections, as long as they didn’t fund candidates directly. Super PACs have already injected fifty-six million dollars into the 2012 race, most of it going to negative advertising. Restore Our Future has spent seventeen million dollars—more than any other PAC—and fifteen million of that has gone to producing and airing ads made by McCarthy’s firm, McCarthy Hennings Media. By contrast, Romney’s official campaign has spent only eleven million on ads. The Super PAC is technically fighting a proxy battle on behalf of Romney, but in practice it has become the head warrior.

The television spot calling Santorum an insider was created not in Boston, where Romney’s campaign is based, but in Washington, in a corporate office building, with a marble-floored lobby, just two blocks from the K Street corridor that Romney disparaged in his exchange with Gingrich. McCarthy has an office on the second floor. With its unpretentious décor, it could be mistaken for a doctor’s waiting room, but McCarthy’s mission is signalled by a framed print on the wall that depicts a look-alike of President George W. Bush tearfully proclaiming, “I can’t help it—I’m such a compassionate conservative!”

McCarthy is known for his ability to distill a complicated subject into a simple, potent, and usually negative symbol. In Florida, Restore Our Future spent $8.7 million on ads, most of which targeted Gingrich, hastening the end of his brief front-runner status in the state. It was a replay of Iowa, where, the previous month, Restore Our Future had helped crush Gingrich’s lead by spending three million dollars on negative ads. The theme of the ads, which were made by McCarthy’s firm, was Gingrich’s “baggage.” The cleverest spot employed a visual gag of battered suitcases, plastered with Gingrich bumper stickers, tumbling down an airport luggage carrousel. One by one, the bags popped open. A green suitcase exploded with loose dollar bills—ostensibly ill-gotten gains from his work as a consultant to Freddie Mac. Another disgorged a video of Gingrich looking chummy with Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who is particularly disliked by conservatives. A female narrator, sounding like a stern mom, listed so many transgressions by Gingrich that the ad became a blur of disqualifying scandal, summed up in the final attack line: “Newt Gingrich—too much baggage!”

At least one of the ad’s accusations was demonstrably false. As a closeup of a Chinese flag saturated the screen with red, the narrator claimed that Gingrich and Pelosi had “co-sponsored a bill that gave sixty million dollars a year to a U.N. program supporting China’s brutal one-child policy.” Politifact, the nonpartisan fact-checking organization, assessed the bill in question, the Global Warming Prevention Act of 1989, and found that it barred any U.S. funds from being used to pay for “the performance of involuntary sterilization or abortion or to coerce any person to accept family planning.” The claim earned Politifact’s lowest rating: Pants on Fire.

A few days after the spot began airing across Iowa, a reporter for the Huffington Post noticed that even residents who said they paid little attention to campaign ads often mentioned one prevailing concern about Gingrich: he had too much baggage. Evidently, McCarthy’s message was sticking. Colleagues note that McCarthy is a shrewd consumer of “O,” or opposition research, on the rival candidates he’s targeting, and that he hones his message using polls, focus groups, micro-targeting data, and “perception analyzers”—meters that evaluate viewers’ split-second reactions to demo tapes.

For all the effort that goes into calibrating the scripts, McCarthy’s ads often have the crude look of a hastily assembled PowerPoint presentation. They feature hokey graphics—key criticisms are highlighted with neon-yellow stripes—and a heavy-handed use of black-and-white to lend a sinister cast to images. The ads are the political equivalent of a supermarket tabloid, emphasizing the personal and the sensational. But when they hit their mark they are dazzlingly effective.

In using television as a political weapon, McCarthy is practicing an art that was pioneered by the Democrats. Arguably, no modern ad has matched the overkill of the 1964 “Daisy” ad, created by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign. Footage of a freckled little girl, counting the petals she was plucking off a flower, shifted into a doomsday countdown capped by a billowing mushroom cloud; the insinuation was that if Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, won he’d trigger World War Three.

Though both parties are outsourcing their dirty work to Super PACs this year, the main PAC supporting President Barack Obama, Priorities U.S.A. Action, has raised less than half the money collected by Restore Our Future. Republicans have led the charge to let corporations and the wealthy spend unlimited amounts to influence elections, and Democrats—who rely more on smaller donations—have fitfully opposed them. Conflicted by their need to stay financially competitive, they have swung between denouncing Big Money’s influence on elections and courting their own rich patrons. Obama condemned the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision as “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health-insurance companies, and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans”; in his 2010 State of the Union address, he criticized the decision while the Justices were sitting in the front row. Unsurprisingly, liberal donors haven’t been racing to write big checks to Super PACs.

This is hardly to say that the Democrats have clean hands. One Priorities U.S.A. Action ad, “Mitt Romney’s America,” earned a “four Pinocchios” rating from the Washington Post. It claimed, dubiously, that Romney would leave “Medicare dismantled” and “Social Security privatized.” And critics say that a recent ad made by the Democratic National Committee took an offhand remark by Romney—“I like being able to fire people”—out of context. “Yes, he said it, but he was talking about firing insurance companies that don’t do a good job,” Mike Murphy, a Republican media consultant, says. He calls such deliberately misleading ads “pejoratively true.” Murphy, who used to be known as Murphy the Mudslinger, and once had vanity license plates that read “GO NEG,” says that pundits are always lamenting that the current election cycle is the meanest ever. But this time, because of the proliferation of Super PACs, they might be right. “I’ve been doing this since the early eighties,” he says. “The standards have dropped lower and lower, as to what’s allowed. There’s less accountability now, because of the outside groups.”

Though Larry McCarthy is playing a key role in the 2012 race, he is reluctant to discuss it. Repeated phone calls went unanswered, and a hand-delivered request for an interview prompted Brittany Gross, a spokeswoman for Restore Our Future, to call and say, “I’m pretty much all you get. And I have no comment.”

“He doesn’t crave the limelight,” Cliff Shannon, the chief of staff for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, says. Shannon became office friends with McCarthy in the nineteen-seventies, when McCarthy was just out of Georgetown University, and they were both working as political aides for Senator John Heinz, of Pennsylvania. “You won’t find him on Fox morning news. He’s not in this for fame and fortune—though I’m sure he’s glad he’s made money. It’s about the work.”

Indeed, McCarthy sees himself as a craftsman. He told an interviewer that what drives him is “what every ad guy is seeking: the Holy Grail of the perfect spot.”

McCarthy’s detailed résumé, posted on the Web site of his advertising company, omits his most notorious creation—the Willie Horton ad. Paid for by a political group officially acting separately from the campaign of George H. W. Bush, it was the political equivalent of an improvised explosive device, demolishing the electoral hopes of Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts. Its key image was a mug shot of Horton—a scowling black man with a dishevelled Afro. Horton, a convicted murderer, had escaped while on a weekend pass issued by a Massachusetts furlough program. A decade earlier, Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have forbidden furloughs for murderers. After escaping, Horton raped a white woman and stabbed her fiancé. McCarthy knew that showing Horton’s menacing face would make voters feel viscerally that Dukakis was soft on crime. Critics said that the ad stoked racial fears, presenting a little-known black man as an icon of American violence.

McCarthy’s ad was condemned at the time, by Democrats and Republicans, for exceeding the boundaries of civility. And it raised unsettling new questions about possibly unlawful coördination between an official campaign and an outside political group. In retrospect, the spot was not an aberration; both in its tone and in its murky origins, it created a blueprint for the future.

McCarthy has rarely spoken publicly about the ad. But in a sworn deposition, given in 1991 to the Federal Election Commission, he theorized that there were two subjects guaranteed to move voters: the economy and crime. “People, they take crime real seriously,” he explained. He later told a reporter that when he first saw Horton’s mug shot he said to himself, “God, this guy’s ugly.” He added, “This is every suburban mother’s greatest fear.” McCarthy admitted to the reporter that he had used a ploy to get the ad past television-station officials, who, he worried, might regard it as inflammatory. (“The guy looked like an animal,” he said of Horton.) So McCarthy made two versions of the ad. The first, which he submitted for review, lacked the mug shot. Once the ad had been approved, McCarthy, claiming that he was fixing an error, replaced it with a version containing Horton’s photograph.

According to Floyd Brown, the conservative operative who hired McCarthy in 1988, the Horton ad “was incredibly effective.” Brown maintains that Dukakis’s lead over George H. W. Bush collapsed after the ad began airing. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster and strategist who also worked on the Horton ad, argues that McCarthy was relatively restrained—there were no photographs of Horton’s victims, for example. And Brown says that the ad became a scapegoat after Dukakis lost. Both men use the word “brilliant” to describe McCarthy. “Larry is not just one of the best ad-makers these days,” Brown says. “He’s one of the best advertising minds this century. You go into a studio with Larry, and you’re watching art. It’s beautiful.” He laughed, then added, “From my standpoint, it’s beautiful.”