Where are the political smears of yesteryear? They’re right at hand in a graphic archive for voters who can’t wait for the election cycle to descend to maximum attack mode.

The nation’s neatly cataloged television ads are available for a nostalgic laugh or wince at the Museum of the Moving Image. The museum is worth a trip to Astoria, Queens, but the graphic history of presidential commercials is also just a mouse click away (livingroomcandidate.org). Once a modern visitor finally views that notorious black-and-white TV ad that most 1964 voters never saw — the “Daisy Girl” mushroom cloud assault on Barry Goldwater as a nuclear war monger — the ads become as addictive as junk food.

The Daisy Girl, with the child’s sweet petal countdown morphing into a booming mushroom cloud, points perfectly to the modern tactic by which strategists float a slashing, artfully underhanded attack in just a few smaller outlets and thereby ignite reams of “free media” repetition as cable, bloggers and mainline news organizations blanket the subsequent controversy. (The ubiquitous Swift Boat ad of 2004 actually ran 739 times in just three states; Daisy Girl ran just once.)

The question of what fresh deviltry awaits us across the next year nags forth from the moving images. The archive for 2004 featured a new sub-file, ominous or not: Web Ads, pointing to their warp-speed, uninhibited power of “viral” redistribution across the electorate.

The museum charms with one of the first-ever 20-second spot ads of 1952, pioneered by Madison Avenue for the candidate known as Ike. It features pre-rap doggerel (“Let’s get in step with the guy that’s hep”) but also the first tinge of putting down the other guy (“Adlai goes the other way”). The images evolve to color in 1968, where one Democratic ad is simply a round of screaming laughter off camera at the very idea of Spiro Agnew getting anywhere near the White House.

The killer instinct of politics is starkly displayed in ads categorized as Backfire. There’s Michael Dukakis’s tank ride to folly, of course, with a link to the Democrats’ desperate antidote ad. This begins with Mr. Dukakis at his TV, crying foul as he angrily turns off the G.O.P. ad that, yes, perpetuates his unfortunate tank ride where he’s grinning like a Mouseketeer.

The ultimate point, as the latest professionals hone their weaponry, is that attack ads surely work and are difficult to ever roll back. A troubled viewer can seek refuge in rosier reams of 30-second promises past. There’s candidate George Bush’s “world of terror” ad in 2000 — a year before 9/11 — in which he is promising voters “a foreign policy with a touch of iron.”