June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Everybody seems to love the Hillary Clinton campaign advertisement that parodies ``The Sopranos.'' I'm nearly alone in thinking that while it's clever, it's completely wrong for drawing attention to a curious marriage and injecting her husband prematurely into the campaign.

You can understand the temptation to play off the finale of the HBO series everyone was talking about. The ad opens with the senator flipping through jukebox titles at a diner. Her husband -- that would be Bill, dressed in an untucked shirt -- walks in and asks, ``So what's the winning song?'' -- a reference to the contest to see what her presidential campaign theme song should be.

True to Tony Soprano's preferences and his own, Bill wants onion rings. She says she's ordered carrots for the table. (Message: She's in charge and still worried about health care.)

Like Meadow Soprano, Chelsea is late because she can't ``parallel park.'' A menacing figure -- an actor from the real show -- gets off his stool and walks toward the bathroom. The screen goes black.

We never find out what happens to the fictional Sopranos. We do find out what happens to the real candidate's theme song. It will be ``You and I'' by Celine Dion, a star in Las Vegas. The song used to be an Air Canada jingle. It's one play away from elevator music. It will offend no one.

Connected to Zeitgeist

If attention is what Clinton wanted, she got it. The campaign didn't need to spend a cent to get a week of exposure. It showed that Hillary could be playful (since she calls herself ``Hillary'' in all her campaign materials, I'll take the liberty here, especially useful in a two-Clinton column). It showed her to be in touch with the zeitgeist and identifying with ordinary Americans. Nothing screams ``everyman'' like the formica tables and linoleum of a diner.

Yet the Clintons have too much in common with the Sopranos to risk parodying them. Through eight seasons of mob life in New Jersey and eight years in the Clinton White House, America has been gripped by these two couples. Much of the fascination is with the wives: How much does she know? Why does she stay?

In the last two seasons, Sopranos writer David Chase made sure that Carmela was held to account. She'd become the person she denied she was to her therapist and priest -- a co-conspirator who turned a blind eye to her husband's sins to enjoy the fruits of his crime.

In Denial?

We don't have a writer to give us the answer for Hillary, who is by no means in her last season. And the Clintons might not know. Did they muddle into the middle of the most treacherous question about them, or do it with eyes wide open? They might be in as much denial about themselves as Tony. He thought his nephew Christopher's movie was great until someone told him the homicidal maniac at the center of it was him.

The ad touches close to the mother lode of Hillary's vulnerability among some women. When you ask them why they don't like her, they say it's because they don't understand why she makes goo-goo eyes at a guy who broke her heart multiple times and humiliated her daughter. After that, pretending to be a teenager in love makes them wonder what else she might be faking.

The Carmela-Hillary juxtaposition has been made before by others, and not in Hillary's favor. For staying with a repeat philanderer, Carmela got to live in a McMansion, wear expensive jewelry and wield derivative power as Queen Bee of the mob families. Hillary got to be first lady with a good shot at the White House.

Thanks to Monica

If Hillary's hoping we'll be kinder to her than Chase was to Carmela, it's hard to see why she would tempt the comparison herself. The only possible rationale is that every time voters are reminded how bad Bill is, her numbers go up. She might not be the senator from New York were it not for Monica Lewinsky.

The other curious thing about the ad is giving Bill a starring role so early in the campaign. It's a mixed reflection of where she is as a candidate. She's earned A's in deportment, preparation, effort, neatness and debating but still isn't doing as well as her campaign had hoped when they said Bill would remain behind the scenes fund-raising until the fall, at the earliest.

Bill is now scheduled to go to Iowa, where Hillary is behind, over the July 4th holiday. While she leads in national polls among Democrats, she lags in some primary states and in most one-to-one matchups with Republicans. The Clintons may recognize that this is the first presidential election to be held in an odd-numbered year. If they wait until 2008 to use Bill, it could be too late.

The biggest problem with playing the Sopranos is that no matter how much viewers found Tony a sympathetic character or felt sorry for Carmela for being married to a murdering sociopath, they don't want either in the White House. The person who had the bright idea to make the ad should get a promotion, but the person who approved it should be fired, unless it's the candidate herself.

Unlike the Sopranos, in the saga of the Clintons, there will be a final accounting before the screen fades to black.

(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 25, 2007 00:27 EDT