HARLESTON, S.C. - Donna Baker can hardly believe what is happening on her television. Every time she looks at the screen, there is an attack ad by George W. Bush or John McCain, or a news story about the Republican presidential primary that invariably focuses on the negative ads.
''I've never seen so many ads. I don't even want to turn on the television,'' said Baker, who lives in nearby Dorchester, S.C. ''All the mudslinging. They think the average person is stupid and doesn't know when to come out of the rain.''
After a New Hampshire GOP primary that focused mostly on issues and featured relatively few attack ads, the contest here is as different as North and South. To hear some South Carolinians tell it, this has become the political equivalent of Sherman's March, with the candidates slashing and burning their way through the state.
It is anything but genteel.
Seemingly overnight, from the Low Country to the booming suburbs upstate, South Carolina is being inundated with far more primary advertisements than ever before. The campaigns, having long ago purchased air time in Charleston and Columbia, recently began gobbling up television advertising slots in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia, hoping to reach residents there. The roads are crawling with the biggest media contingent ever to hit the state.
Technically, the federal spending limit for candidates in South Carolina is about $1.5 million each, although additional spending is allowed for such expenses as bookkeeping and salaries. Bush, who is avoiding the limit by rejecting federal matching funds, plans to spend at least $3.1 million to buy ads.
McCain has a $2.8 million ad budget here, according to his media consultant, Greg Stevens. The Bush campaign says McCain's spending violates the limit, but McCain aides said they are obeying the limit because much of the ad budget is being spent in the out-of-state media markets such as Savannah and Augusta, Ga., and Charlotte, N.C.
However the accounting is done, this influx of at least $6 million by the two campaigns into the radio and television markets seems to have turned the South Carolina airwaves into a nonstop political infomercial - much of it ceaselessly negative.
''We have never seen anything like it,'' said the state's Republican Party chairman, Henry McMaster. ''It is several times more intense than before.'' The reason is clear to McMaster: ''The presidential election is going to be decided here on Saturday.''
While that prediction remains to be proven, there is no doubt that South Carolina is awash in presidential politics.
In prior campaigns, the primary was important, but the candidates spent far less time here because they were competing in numerous states at once in a shorter time period. This year, there is an 18-day gap between the New Hampshire and South Carolina contests, interrupted only by a minor Delaware primary that McCain skipped. The result is that candidates are putting far more money, time, and emphasis on the state.
If either candidate loses by a significant margin, his presidential hopes might be over.
It is hard to overstate how different the campaign has become in South Carolina. In New Hampshire, McCain, a former Vietnam POW, was fond of saying that he was waging a ground war, village by village, holding 114 town meetings and spending 71 days in the state. While he certainly faced criticism from Bush, McCain did not run a series of TV ads against him. But in South Carolina, with more than three times the population of New Hampshire, McCain has held only 35 town meetings and has visited the state for 30 days, campaign aides said.
Meanwhile, Bush has put aside his softer New Hampshire advertising style and launched an airwaves war against McCain. That prompted McCain to respond with an attack that likened Bush to President Clinton. McCain later pulled the ad amid signs that it was undercutting his reformer image and said he would not run any more attacks during the primaries.
It is not clear how these ads will affect the election. In most states, politics is about the future. But in South Carolina, it often seems like it is about the past.
Rare is the political discussion that doesn't eventually touch on slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, states' rights, and the state's historic shift from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Bush partisans say the state usually backs the establishment candidate, while McCain supporters say the state is a haven for mavericks.
Secretary of State Jim Miles, a McCain supporter who is the second-ranking elected Republican in the state, said that understanding the state's history is crucial. South Carolinians have an affinity ''for the swashbuckling image. There is a sense of independence here. ''Don't ever forget,'' Miles said, ''this was the state that fired the first shot'' in the the War Between the States, as it is still called here.
Now, the shots are mostly being fired over the airwaves. The result is clear on leading newscasts such as WIS-TV in Columbia, where the ads run regularly and the primary coverage is all-consuming.
''It is pretty much all presidential primary all the time,'' said WIS anchorman David Stanton.
The radio airwaves also have been flooded. When a reporter drove for two hours from Columbia to Greenville the other day, a flip of the dial found repeated ads paid for by Bush that attacked McCain. The ads, some of them running on religious broadcasts, charged that McCain's tax plan would make it more difficult for people to make tax-deductible donations to churches. (McCain says the plan would only close a loophole used by the wealthiest donors.) Another round of ads, paid for by the National Right to Life group, attacked McCain's position on abortion. During this unscientific sampling, no pro-McCain ads were heard.
The Bush broadsides clearly have rankled McCain, who spent much of Tuesday's debate complaining about the attacks. With primary day fast approaching, the question is whether the intensive coverage and attacks will heighten or lessen turnout.
Baker, the voter who is disgusted with all the ads, said she plans to ignore the attacks when she heads to the voting booth Saturday. But, she said, repeating a phrase uttered often in New Hampshire, ''I won't know who I'll vote for until I walk in there.''
