Is this supposed to be funny? Is this what the Obama camp thinks of the single women on whose backs it expects to ride this cycle?

This made its debut yesterday. The star of the ad is Lena Dunham, the creator of the HBO show “Girls.” We attempted to watch that show once, but couldn’t get beyond about five minutes or so. This is a little easier; it’s only one minute.

Dunham, by the way, was born in May of 1986. She would have been eligible to vote in the 2004 cycle. Maybe she sat that one out, or maybe she was too busy with therapy owing to what her pseudo-pornographer parents did to her as a kid.

Either way, this ad isn’t exactly breaking new ground; it’s really a recycling of a Vladimir Putin ad. We’re now following the Russians into the sewer.

An ad with a tattooed trollop equating voting for the first time with losing one’s virginity opens the Obama campaign up to a multitude of jokes. But really there isn’t any humor here; all this really brings is a degradation of our political culture.

Doesn’t Obama have two daughters? Approving this ad didn’t make him uncomfortable?

Did he want to take a shower after watching it?

UPDATE: By the way, this from Power Line…

Moving beyond Putin, several readers have written to cite P.J. O’Rourke’s essay “Return of the Death of Communism,” collected in Give War a Chance. Writing about the 1990 Ortega-Chamorro election in Nicaragua, O’Rourke describes a billboard aimed at city youth (the voting age is 16 in Nicaragua) showing a moonstruck couple in Ortega T-shirts walking hand-in-hand toward a voting booth beneath the headline: “When you do it for the first time, do it for love.”