As I said, how many months ago now, the moment Senator Barack Obama really gets into this race things are going to get a bit nasty. Columnist Maureen Dowd didn’t get too nasty herself but she has helped launch what will no doubt be a long and grueling section of his campaign yesterday with ‘Obama Legally Blonde?’. You must be a Times Select member to read online but I will give you the highlights:

Dowd describes Obama as seeming “conflicted” and “dazed” during the media blitz that opened his campaign.

He was eloquent, if not as inspiring as his advance billing had prepared audiences to expect. He made his first Swift-boat-able slip when he had to apologize for talking about soldiers’ lives ”wasted” in Iraq. He sounded self-consciously pristine at times, as if he was too refined for the muck of politics. That’s not how you beat anybody but Alan Keyes (Former White House runner who ran against Obama’s in ‘04).

She also says in response to Obama’s constant insistence that the press over-covered pictures of him in a bathing suit during a recent vacation in Hawaii “He poses for the cover of Men’s Vogue and then gets huffy when people don’t treat him as Hannah Arendt.”