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To answer the question succinctly, I think it's about the impact of a soundbite.
The average voter's political exposure is going to be both minimal and passive. That means your ad has to make an impact in a very short amount of time and with a very weak hold on the listener / viewer.
Political positives tend not to assert themselves as strongly in one's consciousness or memory. These things are not attention-getting: Candidate X supports so-and-so; Candidate X has such-and-such experience; Candidate X is a defender of any of a large number of shiny generalities ('fiscal responsibility', 'caring for our elderly', 'fighting the war on terror'). These terms are so common and meaningless that they become background noise, mere static. You will not really remember much of this when you enter the polling booth.
On the other hand, (and especially if we assume that most of our representatives do decent jobs) negatives do catch our attention. Candidate Y's sex scandal; Candidate Y's hideous voting record on this or that important issue; Candidate Y's failure to deal with X while in office (to which we think: "Damn! I've been plagued by X problems for the last two years!").
It's the same reason Ann Coulter has so many readers. Candidates, like columnists, must out-sensationalize each other to get our attention, and that means appealing to the lowest-common denominator and producing shocking, rather than valuable, content.
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