Channeling her inner Cheney, Hillary Clinton dropped a fear bomb, as Michelle Obama might call it, implying in a new ad that if her opponent is elected, your angelic, innocent, sleeping children could die in a terrorist attack.

Obambi-No-More briskly dismissed Hillary’s attempt to cast him as a global ingénue. “Senator Clinton may not be aware, but we already had a red phone moment,” he said at an outdoor rally here, with the crowd of 8,000 booing at the mention of Hillary’s ad. “It was the decision to invade Iraq. Senator Clinton picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And John McCain picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And George Bush picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer.”

Hillary begins her new career in comedy.

The good news for the Democrats so far is that whatever Mr. McCain’s sporadic overlap with liberals, he is emulating almost identically the suicidal Clinton campaign against Mr. Obama. He has mimicked Mrs. Clinton’s message and rhetorical style, her tone-deaf contempt for Mr. Obama’s cultural appeal, and her complete misreading of just how politically radioactive the war in Iraq remains despite its migration from the front page.

In desperation to land some knockout punch, some McCain supporters, following the precedent of Clinton surrogates, are already invoking Mr. Obama’s race, middle name and tourist snapshot in Somali dress to smear his patriotism. The idea is to make him a Manchurian candidate, a closet anti-Semitic jihadist trained in a madrassa run by, say, Louis Farrakhan.

What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.

The next president will have to deal with the reality of a humanitarian, political and military crisis in the Middle East that grows worse with each passing year because of the internationally recognized reality that the United States -- while profoundly influential in the region -- fails to operate as an honest or effective player.

So what is the response from the Barack Obama campaign on this desperate day? And what of the Hillary Clinton campaign?

By now it is no secret that a large segment of the public has soured on "Washington." What Americans have turned against is the broken two-party system. According to a poll taken last year by the firm I founded, Penn, Schoen & Berland, 61 percent of voters say that having a third-party candidate on the ballot in the presidential race would be beneficial to America. A poll by the Luntz Maslansky Group found that 81 percent of the electorate would consider voting for a third-party candidate.

Of course, the obstacles to mounting a third-party candidacy are daunting. Getting his name on state ballots will be a challenge. Raising funds and making his message heard will likewise be difficult. Nader's best hope is that the Democratic Party will sabotage itself by descending into a protracted nomination fight. An intraparty squabble that alienates a significant number of Democratic primary voters and caucusgoers might well trigger defections from the party and a turn toward a third-party alternative. Could the Democratic Party take the one step most likely to cost its nominee the presidency in November? Stranger things have happened.