A contest between a couple of regular guys

This is admittedly superficial, but there’s something refreshing about having a couple of neighborhood guys named Marty and Tito squaring off in this fall’s mayoral election.

It sounds as if they came from the crowd you went to school with, which is to say unpolished and unpretentious, certainly when measured against the well-spoken empty suits that clutter the political landscape today.

Don’t you, too, become weary of blow-dried, stuffed shirts who try so hard to make us feel they’re one of us when, truth be told, if it wasn’t for needing our votes they’d never give us a glance?

Detached? You could call them that, though unctuous captures it better. Once in office, they begin breathing pretty thin air.

For political junkies who remember the days when, as the late Tip O’Neill succinctly noted, “all politics (was) local,” it’s dismaying to find so many candidates now taking refuge behind spokesmen and handlers and pollsters and spin doctors.

Getting to know them is as unlikely as having lunch with the queen. Good luck with that.

Marty, with his “little boy regular” haircut, and Tito, with an impatience that’s irrepressible, still seem refreshingly real, as if they haven’t forgotten where they came from, not yet anyway.

But it’s beginning to seem as if, in the words of Bob Dylan, those times are a changin’.

Marty, like the mouse that roared, has discovered the easiest way to capture attention is to nip at Donald Trump’s heels, thrilling the liberals by scolding the president.

Meanwhile, Tito, having had only moderate success in knocking Marty’s performance to date, is now allowing his supporters to raise a ruckus over coverage of his campaign, suggesting references to his past employment as a pharmaceutical salesman are not only at odds with his professed concerns over opiate addictions, but are blatantly racist, too. Racist? Please. Tito, do yourself a favor and disavow their nonsense. As the old saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

That job you had was not a black-and-white issue, nor were all those parking tickets you picked up and paid along the way.

Indeed, what could make you more Bostonian than getting peppered by parking tickets? That’s an everyman issue if there ever was one.

The good news is there’s still time for this to be an old-fashioned hometown election.

But time’s running out.