In the close election campaign against a Republican president, John Kerry probably thought he had enough to worry about. But now he and his strategists are fretting about a thorny problem much closer to home: Bill Clinton's long-awaited memoirs.
The strategists are seeking a publication date that will spare their man the indignity of being upstaged by the party's celebrity in chief.
Three years after stepping down Mr Clinton, 57, maintains all the trappings of an A-list celebrity: a status that is hardly reassuring to Mr Kerry's handlers, who privately bemoan his elongated sentences and antiquated speaking style.
Mr Clinton's memoirs, for which Random House paid a $12m (£6.6m) advance, will be a blockbuster, and it is expected to offer more candour about his affair with Monica Lewinsky than Hillary Clinton's bestseller published last year.
That has caused some trepidation in Democratic circles, where they fear it will divert attention from Mr Kerry precisely when he is trying to establish his credentials with the voters.
At worst a Clinton book tour would clash with the Democratic convention in July, letting the former president steal the show at the one event at which Mr Kerry was guaranteed to be the star.
The fear is not unfounded. At a gala in Washington late last month at which prominent Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Howard Dean assembled in a display of unity, Mr Clinton easily outshone the other figures on the stage.
In addition there is reason to fear that a Clinton at centrestage will give the Republicans an easy target - especially if there are revelations about the Lewinsky liaison and other affairs - allowing George Bush to recycle the sex scandals of the 90s.
In the New York Times yesterday Democrats suggested Mr Clinton should adjust his publication date according to the political needs of the party. He could publish swiftly in advance of the convention or wait until after the elections.
"It'll get a lot of airspace and I think it's kind of imperative that happens in front of the convention," John Podesta, Mr Clinton's chief of staff, told the Times.
In that way Mr Kerry would have "a clear shot, clear airspace, from the convention through November".
That seems most unlikely. Mr Clinton, a famous procrastinator, does not seem to have finished writing yet. He missed his original deadline last year and now seems unlikely to finish in time for Random House's planned publication on June 15.
But it is unclear whether its Knopf subsidiary will want to delay one of the most expensive projects in publishing history until the end of the year.
Mr Clinton has been writing the book for two years, in longhand, at a converted barn near his home in Chappaqua, New York, in between the $150,000 speeches and other engagements that mark his post-presidential life.
Earlier this year his recording of Peter and the Wolf won a Grammy and later in the year he is to open his presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas.
