Obama, Gore would be a dream team

The Democrats may be in trouble now that Hillary Clinton has begun to play hardball and deploy the politics of fear with her dishonest "red phone" TV commercials, which raised national security issues and attacked Barack Obama's lack of experience.

The commercials turned the tide in Ohio and Texas. They were targeted at older people who would recognize an old-fashioned handset, one that was to represent the "hot line" -- the phone link between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War designed to avert nuclear catastrophe.

It marked a shift from the politics of hope to politics of fear and widened the dislike between Obama and Clinton.

My take is that Obama's best strategy would be to create a dream ticket with someone like Al Gore, who is the only potential candidate with more national security experience and world profile than Republican nominee John McCain.

If Obama does not get a trophy running mate like Gore -- or perhaps Republican Colin Powell -- he will be forced to step up his attacks on Clinton as she will against him. This will simply provide juicy sound bites for Republican advertising campaigners.

The point is that Clinton is becoming a spoiler. In terms of support, Obama deserves to be the nominee because he has racked up millions more votes in more primaries than she has and almost double what Mc-Cain has generated. He is a new, bright voice and is offering Americans a clear-cut choice between a team looking for new policy ideas and one, such as McCain's or Clinton's, that's simply more of the same, which is, by most accounts, not working very well.

It will be interesting to see what Obama does with this rough stuff.

He is a very classy, poised individual but grew up as a mixed-race kid in the U.S. and Indonesia and has, therefore, been used to standing up to bullies and difficulties.

Don't be surprised at what may come out, even indirectly. Demanding the Clintons' tax records, plus a list of his Presidential Library donors, is not below the belt and something Obama should be hammering away at. All this acrimony will make it tough for them to run on the same ticket, even more so since she arrogantly hinted this week she would love to have Obama as her running mate, not the other way around.

Obama could outmanoeuvre her by announcing a dream team of experienced Democrats and Republicans (Gore, Powell, Michael Bloomberg) who he would promise to appoint to his Cabinet. That way, he would underscore his message of hope and collaboration with experienced people rather than allow himself to be isolated as a novice by Clinton or McCain.

Gore has stayed out of the fray and says he is not interested in politics. But his silence has, in part, been because he dislikes the Clinton candidacy. And anything's possible in politics.