Last week George W. Bush decided to slash his advertising spending.

Since early March, the Bush campaign has spent more than $ 40 million, running two or three ads each week at a cost of six to nine million. That will now be cut in half.

Campaign officials say the pullback is part of a long-term strategy to advertise only when voters are paying close attention. Midway through three months of what The New York Times termed a “coordinated blitz” aimed at defining Kerry as “indecisive and lacking conviction,” Bush strategists like Mark McKinnon have decided the public no longer “has the appetite” for such intense advertising.

Democrats, like John Kerry’s former campaign manager Jim Jordan, claim the real reason is that Republican ads aren’t working. Jordan says Bush’s “multimillion dollar gamble” to settle the race early has failed. Most independent polls show the race tied.

But McKinnon, Bush’s media director, says the Democrats’ own polls prove Republican ads have been effective. McKinnon says Kerry was “eight to twelve points ahead” after the primaries ended. “We’ve gotten back in the game and kept it close at a time when the external environment, particularly in Iraq, has been very tough,” he told me. “In fact, we’ve had more success than I expected.”

McKinnon says the Bush campaign’s ‘two message strategy” has worked. “When people think of John Kerry now, they think of two things: he raises taxes and he’s a flip-flopper.”

Meanwhile, Kerry is newly flush with cash, having pulled a record-setting six and a half million out of one event alone in New York last week. So far voters, particularly in the swing battleground states, have heard more about Kerry from Bush than from Kerry. Now he’s intent on beefing up his television advertising, just as Bush is cutting his back. While polls show the race to be a dead heat despite the Republican ad blitz, they also show Kerry’s “unfavorable” rating rose from the low 20s to the mid-to-high 30s during the last six weeks.

Despite Bush’s record-setting expenditures – and as McKinnon points out, the current Bush campaign ad buy “is still massive” — and despite the relative success of Republican strategy, the president remains highly vulnerable. Those annoying “externalities,” such as Iraq, could still blow up so badly no amount of advertising will be able to stop the hemorrhaging.

McKinnon says “our ads are in danger of being overwhelmed” by so-called ‘free media’ - what he describes as “a powerful tsunami of coverage 24/7.” ‘Free’ news coverage is so pervasive that ‘paid media’ - even several hundred million dollars worth, which is the total that will spent during this year’s presidential race, is less and less effective. “You need an enormous amount of money just to cut through the clutter,” McKinnon observed.

The only winners thus far are media executives, who are happy to collect cash from all parties. Analyst Tom Wolzien estimates the total election-year advertising buy (including congressional races) at more than $1.5 billion. How effective the ads are is hardly the concern of broadcasters and cable titans. Where else can politicians go to reach voters en masse? In our ever-fragmenting media omniverse, even as their ratings plunge, television networks still represent the best spot money can buy.