America/Conor O'Clery: AS weird menacing music is played, a picture of Osama bin Laden comes into view. Words flash up on the television screen: "Dangerous World", "Destroy Us" and "No Experience".
A voice intones ominously: "Americans want a president who can face the dangers ahead. But Howard Dean has no military or foreign experience. And Howard Dean just cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy. It's time for Democrats to think about that."
The ads, which have been airing in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, crucial early states in the Democratic selection process, were created not by Bush strategist Karl Rove but by a Democratic group called Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values. The group claims it is unaffiliated, but it is run by people with links to Congressman Dick Gephardt, who is challenging Dean in Iowa.
Its president, Ed Feighan, has donated $2,000 to the Gephardt campaign. The ad underlines how desperate some Democrats are to pull down a front-runner they believe cannot beat George Bush in 2004. This one seems to have been counterproductive, however. The latest poll shows Dean surging even further ahead in the contest for the January 27th New Hampshire primary, with a 46-17 lead over his nearest rival, John Kerry.
The Massachusetts senator is now so strapped for cash that he is mortgaging his half-ownership of his townhouse in Boston's upmarket Beacon Hill for $5 million. The other half belongs to his heiress wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who cannot give him more than $2,000 without breaking election laws.
The Osama bin Laden ad may actually have done more damage to Dick Gephardt, who denies any connection and has called for it to be pulled. Senator Joe Lieberman, who has been making similar charges about Dean, merely said, grinning, that it was "over the top".
The group that made the ad doesn't have to say who donated the $400,000 cost of airing it until after the New Hampshire primary. Such attack ads are likely to become a big feature of the 2004 campaign. A new campaign finance law forbids candidates from accepting the kind of "soft" money that paid for advertising, so it is going instead to shadowy independent groups with fewer scruples.
ANXIOUS to combat the impression that he is a weak liberal who should not be put in charge of America's security, Howard Dean has been recruiting advisers with solid experience in foreign affairs from the Clinton camp.
Among them are Bill Clinton's former national security adviser - and architect of his Ireland policy - Anthony Lake; former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice; former assistant secretaries of defence Ashton Carter and Frank Kramer; and Madeleine Albright's top policy planner, Morton Halperin. Dean is also being counselled by economist Jeffrey Sachs and Gen Merrill McPeak, US Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush.
The former Vermont governor outlined a centrist doctrine emphasising multilateral action in international affairs in a speech this week that was overshadowed by a flurry of criticism of inaccuracies in his public remarks.
Dean recently claimed: "I never said Saddam was a danger to the United States, ever," whereas in September 2002 he told CBS's Face the Nation: "There is no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States." (He added: "The question is: is he an immediate threat?").
Dean has denied that as governor of Vermont he gave a tax break to the discredited energy firm Enron, but records show that Enron was one of a number of companies enticed to the state by a restructured tax code.
He has said he did not support Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich's call in 1995 to slow Medicare's annual growth but, the Washington Post noted, he told a Vermont newspaper he "fully subscribed" to the idea.
Dean has been lashed by his competitors for saying that the capture of Saddam Hussein had not made America safer. "Howard Dean has put himself in his own spider hole of denial", said Joe Lieberman, to which Dean replied that the Washington Democrats who "fell meekly into line" behind Bush on Iraq were now taking every opportunity to mount attacks "that go far beyond questioning my position on the war."
Dean also left himself open to ridicule for putting forward the "most interesting" theory on National Public Radio that Saudi Arabia had tipped off George Bush before 9/11, and then saying he did not believe it himself.
Bush called the theory an "absurd insinuation". Dean tried to wriggle out of this one by saying that at least he had denied the theory he put forward, whereas Vice-President Dick Cheney had yet to deny many of the now discredited theories he used to justify for attacking Iraq.
AND speaking of Dick Cheney . . . the Vice-President has been getting some negative press, too, in his case for ignoring the local media in 32 stops in 21 states since June to raise money for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.
The Buffalo News headlined its story "Cheney's lucrative visit comes at a cost to city," after his motorcade caused traffic jams, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News similarly complained: "Beep, beep, bleepin' beep!"
Last Monday the Vice-President again tried to dodge media attention on a private visit to Pennsylvania, but the Pittsburgh Post Gazette discovered that he had spent the day at the exclusive Rolling Rock Club blasting 70 ring-necked pheasants out of the sky.
Hundreds of pen-raised birds were released specially for Mr Cheney's hunting party, and he later shot an unknown number of mallard duck.
Killing birds on the wing is not an exclusive Republican pastime, it should be said.
In October John Kerry, anxious to show his support for gun-toting hunters, invited reporters to watch him bringing down two pheasants in a cornfield.