photo as part of what will be a long summer and autumn of two-stepping around the race card. Step one: get some rough-houser to fire off a slur, as did right-wing radio shock jock Bill Cunningham (right), sounding off ripely this week about "Barack Hussein Obama" being a hack black politician when he introduced McCain at an Ohio rally. Step two: piously denounce the slur, just as McCain did Cunningham's.

It happened again with a press release from the Tennessee Republican Party which announced that it "today joins a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen Barack Hussein Obama is elected president". On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee duly reprimanded Tennessee for using Obama's middle name and said it shouldn't happen again.

Your middle name is Hussein and you run in a US election in 2008? Of course you catch flak. But these are only the early salvos, as the RNC slime squad runs profile groups

to help them figure out what it can get away with. Already right-wing columns are pillorying Obama's mother, an anthropology professor in Hawaii at the time of her death in 1995, as a fellow-traveling, crypto-commie slut and lover of non-Caucasians.

In the last TV debate, Clinton called on Obama to repudiate the anti-semitic black activist Louis Farrakhan. Obama dodged the bullet, but the Republicans are taking up the theme, painting Obama as a secret Muslim, channeling bomb plots from Osama.

All the same, the race card is a tricky one to play. A face-off between McCain and Obama will target the crucial independent voters, many of whom will be put off by race-baiting. Attitudes have changed. A 2007 Gallup survey found more than three out of four Americans approving of marriages between whites and blacks. In 1994 less than half felt that way. Then again, a lot of nasty things can be said about McCain. Obama can take the rhetorical high road, but he should have some mean stokers in the boiler room.