In the unlikely event that you don’t see what he’s getting at, revisit Ed’s post from last month, when Obama made this charge much more explicitly. Simply the perfect ironic counterpoint to his complaints that McCain has been unfair, culminating in an ad entitled, I kid you not, “Low Road.”

“He’s spending an awful lot of time talking about me. You notice that?” Obama asked a crowd of just over one thousand seated in a university gym. “I haven’t seen an ad yet where he talks about what he’s going to do. And the reason is because those folks know they don’t have any good answers, they know they’ve had their turn over the last eight years and made a mess of things.”

“They know that you’re not real happy with them and so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me,” Obama continued, repeating an attack from earlier in the day. “What they’re saying is ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, he’s a got a funny name.’”

Mind you, this comes on a day when not only does conventional wisdom have it that the GOP is running the same campaign they ran four years ago against the spectacularly white John Kerry, but the great boogeyman to whom Obama is being compared is … Paris Hilton. This isn’t the first time either that the left has gotten impatient with the lack of racial attacks from McCain and demagogued him anyway just to defibrillate the narrative (as they also did with Hillary), but it’s unusual to see the Messiah himself stoop to making the charge instead of outsourcing it to an aide or waiting around for one of his slimier fans to do it for him. Which leads us back, inevitably, to TNR’s piece from February on how Team Barry played the race card on the Clinton machine. Read it if you neglected to do so the previous thousand times I linked it since it’s a playbook for what’s ahead.

Exit question: Was Mark Hemingway being ironic at the Corner when he said of Josh Marshall’s latest consultation with his secret racial decoder ring, he’s “usually above this sort of thing”? Hey, Mark? Define “usually,” please.