DON'T tell Hillary Clinton, but America's presidential election campaign proper broke out last week, with Barack Obama and John McCain firing the opening salvoes of what promises to be a bruising war.
The two men have been circling each other warily for months while the never-ending Democratic primary contest played out. Now, suddenly, battle has commenced.
The opening shot was fired by the current president, George Bush, when he told Israel's
Knesset that anyone seeking to talk to terrorists could be compared to appeasers of Nazi Germany.
Obama was not mentioned by name, but everyone understood the message. The Chicago senator has promised talks "without preconditions" with America's enemies, including Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who has threatened to "wipe out Israel".
Hours later, in case anyone missed the point, John McCain rammed the message home. "I think that Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terrorism."
Obama shot back, branding the comments "dishonest and divisive", and war was declared.
This exchange has also marked the surprise ending of one of the most bruising primary battles in American history. Despite her win in West Virginia last week, Hillary Clinton has suddenly, by pundit consensus, been written off.
The killer blow to her slender hopes of staying in the game came with Obama's endorsement last week by John Edwards, a Democratic veteran who dropped out early in the race.
Edwards is seen as appealing to the same electoral block – blue-collar white voters – that Clinton has made her own, one reason why he is now many people's choice as Obama's vice-president.
But he has made clear he does not envisage that particular script. "Won't happen," Edwards told NBC's Today programme. "This is not something I'm interested in." He revealed, however, that Obama had told him: "I want you on my team. I want help both in the campaign and with the work we want to do when I'm the president."
Both Obama and McCain had earlier promised that their race would be fought with dignity, but these opening shots presage a battle that may make the Clinton-Obama spat look like a tea party.
McCain is hammering Obama on national security because he wants to paint the Chicago senator as dangerously naïve.
Voters seem to agree. Never mind that McCain voted for the war, while Obama opposed it. Opinion polls show the Republican beating his Democrat rival by 55% to 35% when voters are asked who is more "competent" on national security.
But if the campaign ahead will be bruising, it will also be very different from the primary battle that preceded it. Clinton and Obama shared almost identical platforms, leaving them to fight over their contrasting personalities.
The Obama-McCain face-off, however, will expose a wide ideological gulf between America's two parties. Obama wants to quit Iraq, while McCain famously said troops can stay therefor "100 years".
Obama wants to move America towards a national health service, arguing that it is cheaper than the soaring costs of private health insurance.
And Obama wants to bring in protectionist trade measures, arguing that "free trade" has led to millions of American jobs going overseas.
McCain spent time last week outlining how America will look at the end of his first term in office. He painted a rosy picture, but his policies remain anchored in those of the current Bush administration.
But behind the sparring, there is much calculation as both camps try to frame the debate. For McCain, it is national security. For Obama, it is virtually everything else as he seeks to portray his rival as simply Bush in new clothes, heir to one of the most accident-prone presidencies in modern history.
"The American people are going to have a dramatic choice," he told supporters this week. "If they want four more years of George Bush then they should vote for John McCain."
And then there is the race issue. In one of the few polls to ask the question, a fifth of voters in West Virginia last week said that race was the issue that decided their vote.
On Friday came evidence of just how nasty the contest may become. McCain's Republican sidekick and one-time rival Mike Huckabee was speaking at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association, when his speech was interrupted by a backstage noise.
"That was Barack Obama. He just jumped off a chair," he told his all-white audience. "He was getting ready to speak and someone aimed a gun at him and he dived to the floor."
In a part of America where memories of blacks being lynched, shot and burned out of their homes by the Ku Klux Klan remain raw, his comments, and the applause that followed, wiped out any notion of the coming battle being civilised.
But the race issue cuts both ways. Obama will probably lose millions of whites who cannot bear the prospect of a black president. But equally his campaign so far has galvanised millions of African American voters who have turned out for him in unprecedented numbers.
Opinion polls give Obama a few points' lead over McCain, but both men know these are early days. After all, each was the rank outsider when the primary campaigns kicked off.
Key datesThe road to the White House
• June 3 Primaries in South Dakota, Montana (Democratic only) and New Mexico (Republican only)
• July 12 Republican caucus in Nebraska
• August 25 to August 28 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, will chose candidate.
• September 1 to September 4 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota. Republican presidential candidate John McCain will be confirmed.
• September 26 First presidential debate on domestic policy.
• Early October Early voting and absentee voting begins.
• November 4 Election Day
