In a series of recent ads John McCain has been doing his best to make viewers connect Barack Obama to young women.

First came the infamous "celebrity" ad, flashing images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton before sliding Obama in among their ranks. The McCain campaign acknowledged that the purpose of the ad was to make Obama seem "frivolous" and irresponsible in company with these two notorious blondes (who both, incidentally, have been doing serious image-cleanup recently. Bad timing.).

Now the McCain camp has taken the messaging a bit further, with an online ad that concludes with a series of interview clips in which young women praise Obama's more superficial appeal. One praises his aura. Another his eyes. It ends with a man blurting "hot chicks dig Obama."

Silly season has begun, say the pundits. Except it's more than silly -- it's insidious.

There's a clear racial subtext to both these ads, an echo of the "call me, Harold" ads that smeared Democratic Senate contender Harold Ford in 2006. As Kos diarist Kaliki wrote :

The subtext of the add is hot WHITE chicks dig him. The genius of the strategy is that Obama cannot call him out without being accused of playing the race card ...McCain will never run an add saying that Obama will sleep with your white daughter, but his ads will all have a subtle insinuation of this theme.

It's subliminal messaging, and should the Obama campaign speak out, their opponents will quickly dismiss them as whiny, uptight folks who can't take a little humor.

Freakish Rock'n'Rollers

Within that whiny construct lies the other side of this line of attack. When right-wingers smear left-wingers as "rock stars," there's a double insult going into effect.

In conservative minds, rock stars can arouse young women's hormones with a simple pelvis shake, but they themselves are also effeminate. Like Bono, Elvis, and the Beatles, all mentioned in the ad, rock stars have long hair. They're not brawny and they wear tight pants.

This dated (seriously, the Beatles as threatening?), gendered smear remains a golden standard from the playground politics playbook, particularly of late: when in doubt, paint your opponent as a girl, or, to use Gov. Arnold Schwarzenagger's phrase, "a girlyman."

In Great American Hypocrites, Glenn Greenwald explores how the manipulation of gender politics has played out in political campaigns:

Every national Democratic male leader over the past two decades--and especially those who have fought in combat and who remained married to their first wives--has been ridiculed as a week and effeminate, gender-confused freak.

This particular McCain ad appears to pull off the trifecta: racial insult levied at Obama, then insulting him again by implicitly comparing him to presumably vapid young girls and the preening rock stars they may worship.

Take a look at the beginning of the spot. The ad begins with a man, in a high-pitched voice, describing the way Obama's speeches make him want to cry.

Uh-oh. Real men, according to the unwritten rules, don't cry.

Contradictions Cohabiting

If it seems weird for such a contradictory pair of attacks to coexist, that Obama can be tarred with the the scary-black-man-as-sexual-predator slur and also the effeminate pansy slur, well, it is weird.

But it works. First of all, it hems Obama in between opposing stereotypes, making it difficult for him to do anything without unpleasant associations. This Daily Show video (starting at about 2:40) demonstrates the phenomenon: when Obama misses a shot during a basketball game, he's a weak Harvard elitist; when he scores, he's an aggressive Malcolm X.

Secondly, by throwing multiple subliminal insults at the candidate, such negative advertising manages to seize whichever insecurities -- racial or gendered or both -- are most present in its audience's mind.

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, explains this phenomenon:

In a discourse that plays on half-conscious archetypes, opposites can cohabit comfortably--as in dreams... Surrogates need only throw various archetypes "out there," as they say; the dungeon that is the human subconscious can be counted on to do the rest.

Insulting Women

But the ad isn't just insulting to the candidate: it also spits in the face of young women by assuming they don't vote for a candidate based on his policy positions, but rather focus on his dreaminess quotient.

It's not a shock from the man who volunteered his wife for a famous topless pageant.

Towards the end of the ad, when the young women speak about Obama, complementing his aura and then his eyes, we have no idea what questions they actually were answering. For all we know, they could have rattled off a list of Obama's most promising Senate votes, and then been cornered with questions about their favorite of his physical features.

By choosing to implicitly label female Obama fans as only interested in the candidate's "aura," the ad also insults those supporters -- and it's not a stretch to say that it denigrates to the primary issues of substance that many young women are concerned about.

Unfortunately, McCain's stance on reproductive rights was already dismissive of young women. McCain's ads assume that he's already lost the young women vote -- and that it wasn't worth having to begin with. The New Republic recently published a fantastic expose of the candidate's stance on abortion, which reveals a real callousness towards women's needs and health.

Let's hope women make like Paris Hilton, and fight back.