The mud refuses to stick on Obama and McCain

Barack Obama's team worries that a politically significant slice of the American people think he's not really a Christian as he claims, but a closet Muslim plotting to haul the green crescent up the White House flagpole. But what else have the American people got to chew on in this lull before the big party conventions a month-and-a-half away, with the Olympics looming? Now that Hillary Clinton is out of the race, the campaign has gone flat.

At this time in the presidential race four years ago, the press was stuffed with rich fare about John Kerry's love affairs and the ample millions of his tiresome Portuguese wife, formerly married into the Heinz ketchup fortune. Eight years ago there was an equally nutritious menu featuring George Bush's taste for cocaine, his drink-driving rap and his de facto desertion from the National

Guard.

For those eager to detect conspiracy in high places (c. 98 per cent of all adult Americans) there was the membership of Bush Sr and Jr and also Kerry in Yale's Skull and Bones club, where novices endured abominable rites, excitingly related on various Christian sites. Sample: "After this, the initiate is brought before a picture of Judas Iscariot, whose name the group screams three times, and then he is led to the heart of the rite: the initiate is pushed to his knees before a human skull filled with blood placed at the foot of a human skeleton called Madame Pompadour. The crowd implores him to 'Drink it! Drink it! Drink it!' and he does. Then he is hurried to a man dressed as the Pope. But not before the D whips him in the face with his tail."

And before that there was Clinton time, ripe with scandal for eight delightful years.

The Obama-McCain face-off is dull stuff thus far. The nastiest financial scandal in John McCain's life - his efforts to protect Arizona banker Charles Keating - exploded 18 long