Clinton launches new attack ad; Obama responds quickly

Sen. Hillary Clinton left little doubt that she was still in the presidential race to win today when she launched a negative campaign advertisement against rival Sen. Barack Obama.

The new Clinton ad, featured on her YouTube page, showed a series of images of young children asleep in the middle of the night while a phone rings repeatedly.  A voiceover from an unseen narrator describes the scene: "It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep.  But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing.  Something's happening in the world.  Your vote will decide who answers that call."

The commercial indicates that by voting for Clinton, Americans will get "someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world."

Casting doubt on Obama's qualifications and toughness to handle crises in the White House, the commercial asks voters "Who do you want answering the phone?"  It ends with video footage of Hillary Clinton, wearing glasses, as she answers a telephone.

In response, the Obama campaign re-released an ad from last year showing his support from a prominent military leader, U.S. Gen. Merrill McPeak, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Clinton White House.  "Judgment is what we need from our next commander-in-chief," McPeak says, citing Obama's opposition to the war in Iraq. 

McPeak called Obama "our best hope to restore our security and standing in today's world" and implicitly challenged Sen. Clinton's experience argument.  "The old Washington hands have let us down," he says, arguing that America news a "new leader."

Obama himself also weighed in on the controversy, accusing the Clinton campaign of engaging in scare tactics.

By the end of the day, the Obama camp had taken the original Clinton ad and re-invented it for their own purposes into a completely new pro-Obama ad (shown below).  The Obama ad uses the same initial language from the Clinton telephone ad, but the narrator says "Shouldn't the president be the one, the only one, who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq War from the start?" The ad ends with the narrator's message: "In a dangerous world, it's judgment that matters."

The release of the response ad so quickly after the Clinton ad indicates that the Obama team is using "rapid response" tactics similar to those employed by Bill Clinton's original 1992 presidential campaign.