This election cycle, in an attempt to negotiate the pesky complexities of how voters respond to negative ads -- on one hand, they're widely considered to be effective, on the other, they can also backfire on the candidate who goes negative -- some of the candidates, particularly on the Republican side, have employed some innovative methods to attack their opponents without appearing to do so.

Mitt Romney's patented method, employed in Iowa against Huckabee and in New Hampshire against McCain, involves praising his opponents before "drawing contrasts" with them. McCain, in response to Romney, then aired an ad that cited the stinging words from 2 newspaper anti-endorsements in order to call Romney a "phoney." But perhaps the most brazen of all of the Republican ad tricks is Huckabee's stunt from earlier today in which he declared that he had shot a negative ad against Romney but then decided against airing it...but then proceeded to show it to all convened reporters and bloggers.

From Iowa Independent:

A day after calling Mitt Romney "desperate" and "dishonest", Mike Huckabee cancelled a negative commercial aimed at his chief rival in the Republican Caucus.

Then he showed the commercial to the press and even encouraged them to tape it if they wanted to.

Huckabee said that he had anticipated holding the press conference, which was scheduled yesterday, to unveil a commercial he made over the weekend that criticized Romney's record on abortion, taxes and other issues.

"We prepared it, sent it to the stations, (and were) supposed to start running it at noon today," Huckabee said. "This morning, I ordered my staff to pull the ad; I told them I do not want it to be run. If it was run at all, it would be until the stations pulled it off their schedules."

Jane has more at FDL:

It raises the question -- does Huckabee not have enough money to run the ad? Is this a cheap way to get the message out there, and still make a claim to have (ahem) clean hands?

Perhaps a little of both but the latter requires that the press buy into Huck's holier than thou spin on why he pulled the ad and as Marc Ambinder notes:

Most reporters did not.

They started to laugh.

As you might imagine, this didn't stop some reporters from recording the ad as it played. You can see a bootleg version at The Page.