I have a confession to make: I am not a blogger. I am an essayist and fiction writer who happens to be close friends with the infamous blogger Terrible Mother. I went through the University of Oregon’s MFA program with her, am Friend Two on her blog, second fiddle to another close friend of mine, Friend One, aka the poet Keetje Kuipers. I write occasional op-eds for the Oregonian and the Register Guard, and sometimes I freelance to papers, but mostly, mostly, I write in Microsoft Word, and what I write stays in Microsoft word until I send it out for publication. I told this to Terrible Mother yesterday as I tried to explain my paralysis at having a blog on Open Salon. “I don’t do funny, TM,” I said. “And I don’t spend my time thinking about the events of my daily life in a fashion that allows me to form them to delightful narratives of humor and tragedy like you do.”

“Fuck off!” TM said. For those of you who don’t know her, you must understand that she uses such phrases frequently—as terms of endearment. Then TM said, “I know what you should write about next. Have you seen the new McCain ad linking Obama to Britney and Paris?”

“Um, no,” I said. “I don’t surf the interweb.”

“You're a dinosaur,” TM said. “Look, just watch it. You’ll have something to say. Trust me.”

And because I always place my trust in TM, because she’s nearly always right, I surfed the interweb, watched the ad on Youtube. The first time, as the screen went from a shot of Mr. Obama, the color-scheme artificially dark, straight to the paparazzi-filled glamour shots of Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton, the two most Aryan sexpots in Hollywood, I thought I was dreaming. I watched the ad again, and again. What was the ad trying to say or do? The script runs as follows:

Announcer: He’s the biggest celebrity in the world.

But, is he ready to lead?

With gas prices soaring, Barack Obama says no to offshore drilling.

And, says he’ll raise taxes on electricity.

Higher taxes, more foreign oil, that’s the real Obama.

A thirty-second advertisement, to be effective, can only make one point. The text of the ad is rhetorically schitzophrenic—'celebrity' versus ' leadership' might make a point, but energy policy has nothing to do with anything. The intention, the manipulation, could only be coming from the pictures. The point was made in the first ten seconds—something to do with Mr. Obama and his relation to celebrities like blond-haired, blue-eyed Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton, who are widely known as vacuous and, shall we say, fast and free with their sexuality. Faced with questions about why he chose the two young stars to compare to Mr. Obama, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said:

"What we decided to do is find the top three international celebrities in the world, and I would say from our indications, Britney and Paris came in second and third. Will people think of this as negative advertising? Look, it is the most entertaining thing I have seen on TV in a while. It is not our campaign that is trying to make him into an international celebrity. It's his campaign... I don't know Paris Hilton and Britney Spears but they are international celebrities, so, you know, apples to apples."

Apples to apples? Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are hardly the top celebrities in the world. And let’s consider the intellectual comparison. The two young women wouldn’t break 150 in combined IQ, and would be hard-pressed to write a complete sentence without use of text-shorthand. Mr. Obama writes speeches so eloquent that criticizing his eloquence is all his opponent can do. Neither Ms. Hilton or Ms. Spears attended college. Mr. Obama attended Harvard Law, and taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago Law School. The idea of comparing them is ludicrous.

Yet taking on the inappropriateness of the comparison ignores the main point: Mr. Obama is, well, a man. One explanation is that in comparing Mr. Obama with ditzy women, the intent is to emasculate him, to make him appear effeminate. Yet the ad doesn't have that effect-- the grainy video footage, the dark colors of the background when we see Mr. Obama, the pictures of the women as glamour shots, not interview footage that makes them seem stupid and shallow. If you want to compare Mr. Obama to a male celebrity, the point might make sense—perhaps a man often embroiled in scandal, or known for a lack of sense in his public comments, or for the scandal in his personal life. Surely such a celebrity exists. In fact, why not a black man embroiled in Hollywood drama—a rapper or singer or sports star? The answer is simple: doing so would so blatantly invoke race that McCain’s campaign wouldn’t be able to get away with it. The McCain campaign is well aware that race and difference are still their best hope—call it the West Virginia factor, the Hussein-ing of the candidate. With Mr. Rove’s old operatives back in play, stooping low isn’t a problem. Yet how to stoop? How to summon fears about race, to bring them out subconsciously and strongly in a manner that can’t be dismissed as simple racism?

The answer is, quite simply, a word: miscegenation. A black ''buck' among the blue-eyed girls. Old, old fear, in a new box. Watch the ad. The dark (I would say darkened) image of Mr. Obama, the juxtaposition with the close-ups of blond-haired, blue-eyed Ms. Hilton and Ms. Spears, lips open a little, lustful gazes. Consider their recent histories of sex tapes and going without underwear, of overnight Vegas marriages and a parade of men in and out of their bed, photographed, documented, playing on reality shows and in the crossfire of the Hollywood gossip mags. If you were going to choose a female celebrity known for idiocy, you’d choose Jessica Simpson, who famously thought that her can of tuna fish was ‘chicken’, as it was labeled ‘chicken of the sea.’ These two women were included as much for the way they make us think of sex as for their all-American Barbie looks. Do you want a black man near our women? Do you trust them? The ad makes a nonsense point about Mr. Obama’s celebrity, and moves incoherently through claims of energy policy. That isn’t the point at all.

When I wrote a column about Reverend Wright and the Politics of Race for the Oregonian, I received a great deal of hate mail. I pointed out in that column that in many states in the US, including Oregon, anti-miscegenation laws remained on the books as late as 1967-- a point I find interesting as a half-Japanese fellow. An angry conservative wrote me to tell me how much he hated me and Mr. Obama and the end of such laws. “His mother was a mudshark whore, just like yours,” he wrote. “And America has no place for traitors like your mothers, or the spawn of sin like yourselves.”

What’s interesting is the poverty of discussion about the ads. Mr. Obama himself has tried hard not to discuss the ads—he’s well aware of the irony of the twenty-four news cycle: rumors and falsehoods, repeated in being debunked, become reinforced as fact. See, Swiftboat ads, summer of 2004, or Obama's a Muslim, as of this week. Obama has done his best not to speak of race, or call foul, afraid that it will just make the situation worse by bringing more airplay. "In no way do I think that John McCain's campaign was being racist," Obama said. "I think they're cynical. And I think they want to distract people from talking about the real issues."

Cynical, indeed. Only the New York Times editorial board is calling it like it is, as they did today in a brave editorial: “The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.”

Well, a spade’s a spade. It isn’t coincidence that we get Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, queens of sex-scandal, or that Mr. McCain’s ad shows only images of Mr. Obama (the ending image is as dark-skinned a photo of Mr. Obama as you can tint on Photoshop). The meaning of the ad is in the images. It would be naïve to believe that they ‘didn’t mean anything like that’, or that they would never draw to draw up fears so subconscious that most people watching the ads wouldn’t understand what they were taking away. What this ad does is offer a free pass to the watcher who still has, deep down, a discomfort or fear of a black man. Gosh, I don’t like or trust that fellow, the watcher can think. Oh, and it’s because of Obama’s—celebrity status. No, no, it’s because of his energy policy. Yeah, that's it.

It’s about something far more serious, something most of us don’t want to talk about. And it makes me sad that McCain would stoop so low—and sadder still that it might work. We’re not as far from the past as we like to imagine. We still stare at the multiracial couple at the restaurant, admit that we can’t quite imagine that, privately, however enlightened we think ourselves. Tell me it’s not true, folks, but I can’t find a way not to despair, sometimes, in America.