Put on your hip boots. This presidential election is going to get deep, and I don’t mean philosophically.

With John Kerry almost sure to be the Democratic nominee, the same attack machine that battered President Bill Clinton for eight years has been cranked up again.

Right-wing talk radio – there is hardly any other kind – is operating at a near-hysterical level. The religious right has wrapped itself anew in sanctimony and is working to exorcize Democrats as if they were demons in political drag.

And the Republican Party, with more money than God, already has started advertising, going national with a video mailed to 6 million and posted on the Internet, charging that Kerry has taken money from special-interest contributors, which is at the same time absolutely true and breathtakingly cheeky.

Bush, after all, is political history’s champion money-grubber, grubbing largely from sources more interested in their own ends than in public-spirited support of the great electoral process.

For their part, Democrats continue trying to pin an AWOL rap on the president, claiming he ducked out on a year of his Air National Guard duty. Military records released by the White House and testimony from one guard officer indicate Bush showed up at least now and then during the year, but the point is probably not provable either way.

That gives Democrats something to grumble about endlessly if they want, though it is not clear that anyone outside tight little partisan circles much gives a hoot. (I’ve always thought the fact that Bush cut line, using political leverage to get into the guard in the first place and thus avoid the Vietnam draft, was more damning than claims that he dogged it later on.

His whole life, from college admissions through a succession of businesses to politics, was greased by influence and sycophancy.)

In the spirit of so’s-your-old-lady, conservatives are re-writing Kerry’s biography to make him out as a near-traitor. Never mind his beribboned service in Vietnam. To hear conservatives tell it, all that counts is that he later led Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as if that principled dissent was somehow appalling.

In evidence of Kerry’s supposed perfidy we are being shown a photograph of him with Jane Fonda, who is, as you know, the devil.

Well, “with” is not quite right. If you squint, you can sort of make out the blurry Kerry a few rows behind Fonda in an anti-war crowd at Valley Forge.

They both spoke at the rally, but Fonda can’t remember that they even so much as shook hands and anyway this was two years before the actress made herself notorious by doing dippy photo-ops in Hanoi.

Another photo making the rounds shows Kerry and Fonda shoulder-to-shoulder, apparently on a speakers’ platform.

One little problem with this further proof of their supposed chumminess: Fonda wasn’t even in the original photo. The picture is a forgery.

And, as if the election weren’t scabrous enough already, Matt Drudge is back doing businesses at the his old Internet stand, hustling rumors that Kerry had a recent two-year affair and has stashed his inamorata in Kenya.

It’s going to be a long year.

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Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com.

2003, Cox News Service