Let me offer a Swiftian (Jonathan, not Tom) perspective on the Clintons’ largely race- and religion-based assault on Barack Obama—a multi-pronged attack they notoriously told the New York Times would mean chucking everything at him including a very mucky kitchen sink.

I modestly propose that it’s a really good thing. It will actually help Obama—make him a stronger candidate if it doesn’t kill him off in the process. Sort of the way all those lightning bolts hitting Godzilla only made him more powerful.

They began chucking muck long before their official announcement. It started when the Clintons saw they were losing the Iowa caucuses.

The first muck-chucker was Bill Shaheen, their New Hampshire organizer, who hinted Obama not only used drugs—as confessed in his autobiography—but perhaps even peddled them. This was compounded by Clinton strategist Mark Penn tossing around the words “cocaine,” “cocaine” and “cocaine.”

Shaheen had to quit the campaign. Penn stays on and on.

Then both Clintons worked subtly and less than subtly to remind everyone that Obama has a different paint job than we pale-faces, with the implicit subtext that folks of such hue can’t win big elections.

OK, says Bill—making an invidious exception—maybe a Jesse Jackson can win South Carolina where more people look like him, but that doesn’t count in the big picture. (Bill was sidelined for a while but not excommunicated.)

Meanwhile, another surrogate, former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, begins the Muslim-terrorist muck-chucking, reminding us of that funny Obama-Osama-Obama-Osama name and proclaiming (falsely) that the candidate attended a “secular madrassa.”

Most understand a madrassa to be a Muslim fundamentalist school. Kerrey hasn’t been heard from since.

The follow-up was a photo of Obama decked out in a turban and diaper while on an African trip. Matt Drudge says it was leaked by someone in Clinton’s campaign.

And, hey! Remember his middle name is Hussein.

Does all that make him a secret Muslim? “Not so far as I know…” snivels Hillary.

Next out of the mucky sink is the “red telephone” ad announcing a certain someone might not be able to handle an international crisis—also implying that sleeping children might be threatened by…What?… Who?

Then the Clinton campaign creates something called a “commander-in-chief threshold” and national security “test,” which they say Obama cannot cross and hasn’t passed. Of course not: since they constructed the threshold and invented the test, only they can say who can cross or pass.

Astonishingly, she gives John McCain passing grades, but not the guy she later suggests could be her running mate.

Now comes the history-making Geraldine Ferraro who blurts right out that Obama is only where he is because he is “lucky” enough to be a half-Afro dude with a terrifying name (and really big ears, maybe?). Millions of voters seem to be taken in by that “concept,” says Ferraro.

What concept? Equal opportunity? A lot of pale-faces don’t much like that!

She has to quit the campaign, but won’t apologize for her demeaning remarks.

She claims she was called a “racist,” but nowhere is there any record of anyone in or near the Obama campaign using the word. She is the one who uses it, but continues the Clintonian muck-chucking by accusing Obama of “playing the race card.”

Welcome to Hillaryland, Geraldine. There in the center ring they are playing tapes of Obama’s pastor making a far-out Afro-nationalist speech.

Hey—if he’s got a Christian pastor, however loony, how could he be a Muslim?

But wait: there’s more.

We’ve got five weeks until the Pennsylvania primary, during which Hillary must totally disembowel Obama in order to have any hope of approaching his popular vote margin, let alone his delegates.

OK—let’s be empirical.

Mucky as the Clinton campaign has been, it is nothing compared to what the Republicans and their swift-boating surrogates will chuck at Obama. They will call a spade a spade.

Therefore, the Clintons are doing Obama a favor.

He is really lucky: If he survives, he will be stronger—inoculated, to some degree against the slings and arrows of outrageous Republicans.

If, however, she somehow destroys him—along with the rest of the Democratic Party—it simply means he would have lost to McCain anyway.

So get into that kitchen, Hillary. Get back to that sink and…keep on chuckin’.

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Don Rose is a veteran strategist for liberal independent and Democratic campaigns and a political columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.