While it seems early in the race to be talking about, uh, race, the damage has been done: McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, accused Obama of playing the race card by mentioning that he doesn’t look like the presidents on the dollar bills (green) and the response of the presumptive Democratic candidate has been somewhat muted. 

“The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates,”  the New York Times reported this morning, which makes me worry. It wasn’t too long ago that Obama was invoking Sean Connery’s speech to Kevin Costner in The Untouchables: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue.” That, he says, is “the Chicago way.”

Obama’s missing years — those the least reported about in the media, and given the least inspection in the press — were in the state legislature of Illinois, and longtime watchers of that august body say dirty pool is the default mode, and they like it that way. (This kind of hardball is a matter of native pride and legend:It was Chicago’s own David Mamet who wrote Connery’s speech.) He can fight dirty, they insist, not skip Bambi-like through the forest singing of change. It may be time for the candidate to get in touch with his inner thug, to pull that gun he was talking about. May I suggest some bullets?

He can’t brand McCain old & white when that is so much of the Arizona senator’s own campaign strategy, but what about making more of the fact that the man has flip-flopped on nearly every major issue, from the Bush tax cuts for the rich to off-shore drilling? (This accusation helped smear Kerry in the last election.) When he has been consistent he has mostly been wrong, as in his support of the Iraq war — a three trillion dollar fiasco that has not made us one bit safer — and his tired belief that the Vietnam war was just and should have been won. He’s opposed to abortion and will pack the Supreme Court with justices who feel the same; he has abandoned the immigrants whose cause he once triumphed; and his missus is a scary Stepford Wife who eats live kittens. (I made that last part up.)

The trap, of course, is that Obama is supposed to be a different kind of candidate, one who doesn’t need to sink to that Karl Rove like level of mud-slinging and innuendo. But he does. The Republicans’ willingness to go so low so early in the game is a sure sign that they know they’ve got nothing, and that any rational weighing of the choice this fall will send voters away from the tired policies of the last eight years, most of which McCain seems just fine with. But rational doesn’t have much to do with it come voting time. Some people want to know how Obama, our potential commander-in-chief, responds when attacked. Now is the time to show them, Chicago-style.