Close-up: Young girl in summer dress against backdrop of grassy field. Rural idyll. Counts the petals of a flower as she picks them off.
Voice-Over: "Our security has been sold to Communist Red China in exchange for campaign contributions . . . If Clinton-Gore are capable of selling our nation's security, what else are they capable of?"
Sound fades to missile countdown.
Fade To: Nuclear explosion.
Voice-Over: "Don't take a chance. Please vote Republican."
As election day looms, the campaign is getting dirtier, the spending more frantic.
But the airing of the remake of the infamous 1964 "Daisy" ad seems to have gone a bit too far. The campaign team of Mr George Bush has asked for, and received an assurance from a group of over-enthusiastic supporters in Texas that they will shelve it.
Republican allegations that the Clinton White House knowingly took campaign contributions from the Chinese in 1996 have never been proved.
The 60-second ad was originally used against Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnston to suggest his views were so extreme as to be likely to trigger nuclear war. Even then it was too much and was withdrawn.
But the campaign teams are pulling few punches.
In one phone blitz in Michigan a tape is used of a Texas widow who implies that Governor Bush was responsible for the death of her husband "from an illness that nursing home attendants failed to notice". Mr Bush had opposed legislation to raise safety standards in nursing homes.
In another a Texas mother attacks him for accepting "$1.3 million from corporate polluters, and he's allowing them to keep polluting while my kids suffer".
In Florida, the Democrats have used a tape of Ed Asner (Lou Grant) warning of the danger to senior citizens of the Bush pension proposals, "even threatening current benefits . . . that's a violation of sacred trust".
The Republicans say they are shocked, but are fighting fire with fire. In Oregon, Wisconsin and Washington - all states where Mr Gore's lead is vulnerable to the Green Party candidate, Mr Ralph Nader - the Republicans will today be broadcasting an ad featuring Mr Nader saying: "Mr Al Gore is suffering from election-year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of."
The Nader campaign responds that "the ad fails to mention that George W. Bush also has an abysmal environmental record".
