Clinton joins his Vice-President out on the stump

Vice-President Al Gore has finally answered one of the most delicate - and gossiped about - questions of the 2000 election campaign. Will he have the master politician, Bill Clinton, stumping for him in the last two frenetic weeks of the campaign?

Vice-President Al Gore has finally answered one of the most delicate - and gossiped about - questions of the 2000 election campaign. Will he have the master politician, Bill Clinton, stumping for him in the last two frenetic weeks of the campaign?

The answer, given by Mr Gore on NBC's Today show, is "Yes". "President Clinton," he elaborated, "is my friend. He is helping out and I welcome him." Mr Gore was speaking just hours before he and Mr Clinton appeared together in Missouri - one of the four or five most closely contested states - at the funeral of the Governor, Mel Carnahan, who was killed in a light plane crash on Monday.

Mr Gore's clarification was necessary because the rarity of such joint public appearances over the past two crucial months of campaigning had spurred increasingly open speculation about the state of relations between Mr Gore and Mr Clinton. Until the two emergency meetings on the Middle East at the White House last week, the two had not been seen together since Mr Clinton symbolically "passed the baton" to Mr Gore in Michigan after the Democratic Convention in August.

It is not that Mr Clinton has not been active in Mr Gore's support. He has criss-crossed the country, raising upwards of $90m for Democratic Party candidates, including his Vice-President and his wife, Hillary - the Senate candidate for New York. What he has not done, though, is to share a platform with Mr Gore or openly tout his candidacy, except behind closed doors.

Mr Clinton said all along that he would do whatever the Gore campaign wanted him to do: until now, the instruction was to stay out of sight. As Chris Lehane, Mr Gore's spokesman put it: "Al Gore is going to win this race as his own man, as it ought to be."

But as the debate season passed, and Mr Gore still failed to escape the "margin of error" in the opinion polls, the simmering private argument about the deployment of President Clinton started to seep into the open. Democratic Party organisations from California to Pennsylvania were reported to have urged the Gore campaign to give Mr Clinton a more public role. Mr Clinton's unrivalled popularity among key groups of voters - including inner-city black voters - is seen as a big asset by party organisations in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Missouri. His appeal to California's wealthy could also be crucial.

Even this week, however, Gore campaign leaders were still insisting they had no plans to use Mr Clinton for anything beyond fund-raising. Their dilemma was twofold. Recognised - by Democrats and Republicans alike - as the most gifted campaigner in the United States today, Mr Clinton eclipses almost anyone else wherever he appears. If Mr Gore were a more adept and natural campaigner, he might hold his own; but any joint campaign appearances during the primaries turned into near-disasters for Mr Gore.

The other drawback is perpetually in the background, but is never mentioned directly: the Lewinsky affair and impeachment. Both Mr Gore and George W Bush are pitching themselves as men of integrity and moral values. The Gore campaign fears that a visible role for Mr Clinton on the hustings will remind voters that Mr Gore remained loyal to a personally tarnished President. The disgust factor is hard to gauge, but in so close an election any complication has to be avoided.