WASHINGTON -- If the presidential campaign were kindergarten, rude people could be sent for a time-out or made to write "hope and change" on the blackboard until they are nice.

In kindergarten, you're not allowed to call anyone a monster or make fun of someone's middle name.

But this is politics, in a land where freedom of speech is carved into the rock of the republic, and these are grown-ups with thick skins stretched over awesome amounts of self-esteem.

It's a land that has known and survived the scorched earth politics of the late Republican Lee Atwater, the shark grin of Democratic strategist James Carville, the "rhymes with witch" and "Ozone man" wisecracks of recent years, and the ghosts of distant ages who knew what nasty campaigning was really about.

It's America. You got a problem with that?

A cycle of insult and puffy indignation has taken hold in the contest between Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, with supporters of Republican Sen. John McCain gleefully pitching in.

It's been a time to denounce, dissociate, distance and regret, to nurse tender sensitivities, and to see the occasional offender cut from a campaign. Geraldine Ferraro, who resigned a Clinton post Wednesday, was the latest to go.

Obama is generally sanguine about fur flying around him and claws coming at him. But he pays people to get angry on his behalf.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, for one, was outraged when Ferraro declared that Obama has only come this far because he's black. Now Ferraro is outraged at Axelrod's outrage.

She stepped up a campaign crowd repeatedly invoked Obama's middle name, Hussein, and called him "the great prophet from Chicago" who wants to sing Kumbaya with "world leaders who want to kill us.'

The talk show host was outraged at McCain's apology.

Now McCain has rebuked Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa for saying Obama is viewed by terrorists as their savior. King couldn't resist using Obama's middle name, too. McCain said through a spokesman that King degraded civil discourse.

As for insulting McCain himself, opponents might as well forget it. By now, he's heard it all and said it all.

This includes the innuendo spread in 2000 suggesting his adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate child -- an echo of the 1884 whisper campaign against Grover Cleveland.

A man who calls himself "older than dirt" cannot be easily put out when someone else raises questions about his age. A snippy display with a reporter revealed a temper he's known to have. He rode out reports that he had inappropriate links with a lobbyist.

As far as is known, his aides are not outraged at anything at this time.

McCain survived torture in Vietnam. In this campaign, sticks and stones are not likely to break his bones.