Last week, Sen. Barack Obama put the Republicans on notice: He and his surrogates are going to link criticism of him to racism -- both overt and covert.

"They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

Obama's making a mistake here; it was the Clintons, not the Republicans that made those insinuations.

But it doesn't matter. As I've chronicled before, you can't criticize a black person without being tarred with the racist label.

John J. Pitney over at National Review makes the case with constructive use of LexisNexis databases.

An even more audacious accusation came after Obama spoke of “bitter” working people who “cling to guns or religion.” Critics slammed him as an elitist, and many conservatives noted that he was the latest in a long line of liberal snobs. One may think that that likening Obama to Adlai Ewing Stevenson II and John Forbes Kerry is about as un-racist as you can get. Yet journalist David K. Shipler wrote: “‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”

And “outlandish” is another word for “absurd,” which is another word for “preposterous.”

Get ready for the first post-racial presidential candidate to demonstrate he's anything but.