Female narrator's voice (sounding white, but one can't assume), talking about Obama being disrespectful of the white female VP nominee. They are tapping into one of the most visceral racial resentments in this country: the white response to supposed insults against white women by black men. How many lynchings during the height of Jim Crow were tied, at least in pretext, to some kind of attack against or insult to a white woman by a black man? How much Southern racial mythology centers around the notion of white men protecting their women from black male aggression?

Indeed, this ad isn't attacking Obama on the issues. It's not attacking him for his experience or past. It's not even attacking him for lying about Sarah Palin.

It's attacking him for not being respectful enough to a white woman.

Don't believe me? Imagine the Obama campaign ran an ad saying that McCain, for disagreeing with Joe Biden, wasn't being respectful enough to him. It'd sound kinda stupid, kinda like something... that would never happen.

That "How disrespectful" is the center of this ad, the most emotionally laden sentence in it.

The To Kill a Mockingbird strategy might get him the racist vote, but it's pretty offensive.

Not that it should surprise anyone at this point.

Update: Oh, and the ad's filled with lies too.

The "they" is never specified here, but the notion that Barack Obama's campaign "dismissed" Sarah Palin based on her looks twists what was clearly a self-deprecating joke by his running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr. The senator from Delaware laughed as he compared himself to the Alaska governor: "Well, there's obvious differences. She's good-looking."

The "doing what she was told" line is an exaggerated version of a comment by Obama strategist David Axelrod. "She tried to attack Obama by saying he had no significant legislative accomplishments -- maybe that's what she was told," he said. Axelrod did not say that Palin was entirely programmed by the McCain campaign.