Does this presidential race offer fun for the whole family, or what?

Racial conflict? Check.

Gender politics? Check.

What could possibly be left? Let’s introduce class and elitism concerns into the center ring, shall we?

These are the very tools that vanquished past candidates, mostly Democrats, but also Poppy Bush when used artfully by Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton.

Since acquiring testicular fortitude during the brew-and-bowl primaries, Hillary Clinton has refashioned herself as the champion of the working-class voter.

Fine, all the candidates care about the working-class voters, and the poor voters, and the voting voters. But Clinton’s ads went further, painting Barack Obama as an out-of-touch (read elitist) coward because he won’t join Hillary and John’s National Lampoon Summer Gas-Tax Vacation, as abysmal an idea as any that have erupted in the interminable campaign.

In Indiana, union supporters branded Obama as one of those “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”

Oh, right, the old Italian shoe/steamed milk conundrum.

Obama and Clinton are both wealthy, urban Ivy League-educated senators. Hillary went full-bowl on her father’s Scranton roots, though she was raised in Chicago’s upper-class suburbs. Obama was a scholarship student reared by a single mother and his grandparents. His grandmother rose to become a Bank of Hawaii executive vice president, a feat to be celebrated.

No one in the race was raised in poverty, though it is true that Clinton and John McCain, an admiral’s son, were longtime beneficiaries of federal housing.

We’ve returned to the funhouse with convex mirrors, where the new swift-boat attack has been upgraded to a yacht. The Clintons, having grossed $109 million in eight years, powder-puff Obama as being elite.

Anyone in the U.S. Senate is elite, if elite means rising to the top in power and influence. Anyone running for president is elite, even Ralph Nader. And, by the way, isn’t that the American dream?

McCain made his millions the old-fashioned way. He married it.

Cindy McCain may be the trophiest of trophy wives – beauty-queen looks, two decades her husband’s junior while bringing her own millions. As chairman of the privately owned Hensley & Co., one of the nation’s largest Anheuser-Busch distributors, she has personal wealth estimated to range from $28 million to $100 million which, any way you count it, is a lot of suds.

If anyone in this race can claim to be a beer man, it’s John McCain.

Know why the Arizona senator wants lower gas taxes this summer? So he can bond with the working man while saving money flying on his wife’s Cessna Citation Excel, $4,216 to fill at the pump.

McCain is the guy who boasts that when his 96-year-old mother was denied a rental car in Europe because of her age, she promptly bought a BMW.

My friends, as McCain is wont to say, what we’re experiencing now is a mere preview of the general election. We’re in for another death-match edition of class wars. The final two candidates will try to prove who is most humble, bowling and downing boilermakers across the country.

I don’t know why Americans want candidates as uneducated, down-on-their-luck and in debt as they are.

Or why politicians think Americans want them. I want my president to be way smarter than I and other Americans are. To vote as if the presidency was one big Facebook is beyond stupid. It’s dangerous.

Look what happened the last time people elected a candidate they thought was as simple as they were.

Karen Heller is a columnist for Philadelphia Inquirer. E-mail to [email protected].