NB: The headline is a reference to "The O.C."  See number 82.

The Democratic primary in North Carolina is still a dozen days away--but it looks like the general election has already begun.

And the press is partly to blame.

Barack Obama had yet to leave the tarmac in Pennsylvania Tuesday--and news of his loss to Hillary Clinton had yet to break--when two combative anti-Obama TV ads suddenly materialized in the Tar Heel State. The first, called "Victims" was the work of Republican activist Floyd Brown, who bruised Michael Dukakis in 1988 with the infamous "Willie Horton" ad; in the same vein, Brown's new spot attempts to connect a 2001 string of Chicago gang murders to Obama's refusal to expand death penalty legislation. "Can a man so weak in the war on gangs," intones an ominous female narrator, "be trusted in the war on terror?" The North Carolina Republican Party produced the second ad, called "Extreme," which includes footage of Obama's controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. saying "God damn America." "For 20 years, Barack Obama sat in his pew, listening to his pastor," it grumbles. "He's just too extreme for North Carolina."

Since then, the two spots have saturated the airwaves. But the funny thing is, neither one is actually airing on North Carolina television. Instead, "Victims" and "Extreme" were first released on the Internet in order to raise the money required to eventually get them on the tube. With only $14,000 in the bank at the end of March, Brown's new PAC, the National Campaign Fund, couldn't afford a single ad buy; ditto for the N.C. GOP, which includes a desperate plea for cash at the beginning and end of their YouTube clip. But as soon as the videos--with their "irresistible" racial overtones--hit the Web, the MSM swooped in and started squawking about Obama, Wright, gangs and racism and predicting that "a general election featuring Obama and [John] McCain may unavoidably be a nasty affair." All while showing the ads for free. Today, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer even did a segment on how Brown tricked the media into promoting his work (above); "Victims" was screening in the background.

Is race an issue here? Perhaps. Brown isn't openly saying that Obama is "weak on gangs" because he's black, but it's hard to imagine that he'd object if a few voters came to that conclusion themselves; his fundraising appeal does, after all, go out of its way to call the Illinois senator "Barack Hussein Obama." (Plus, the "weak on gangs" = "weak on terror" equation is a bit of stretch, seeing as Obama supports the death penalty and voted in 2003 to apply it to convicted terrorists. Wonder why Brown didn't highlight that vote.) Meanwhile, "Extreme" is so convinced of Wright's toxicity that it not only implies Obama sat through a sermon he never attended ("God damn America") but tries to tar Democratic gubernatorial candidates Richard Moore and Beverly Perdue (both Obama supporters) with guilt by second-degree association. (And considering that "the specter of a white woman and black man together has been used, subtly and not so, in Southern politics dating back to Reconstruction," the N.C. GOP's choice to linger on an image of the black Obama embracing the white Perdue only encourages racial speculation.) That said, what was originally restricted to a small audience of online die-hards is now familiar to millions of cable news viewers thanks to Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer--who, in jabbering compulsively and endlessly about the "racial content" of the ads, have only reinforced and amplified whatever the creators' initially intended (or not). We took the bait.

And that, I think, is the real danger of a McCain-Obama general election. For their part, McCain and the RNC have been careful to distance themselves from "Extreme." "The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats," wrote McCain to the North Carolina party chairman. "In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement." Whether that's honor, necessity or calculation, I don't know. But the state GOP is planning to air the ad regardless, and McCain will, in the end, get to have it both ways. So you can expect this chain reaction--sludge; spotlight; disavowal; more spotlight--to continue through November; if you think the primary has been race-obsessed, you ain't seen nothing yet. Given that, I'm not saying the press shouldn't cover the questionable barbs that will surely crop up if Obama is the Democratic nominee. That's our job. But unless we want to make the entire campaign about Obama being black, we should perhaps only obsess over the messages that manage to reach voters organically--instead of delivering them ourselves.

I'm not holding my breath.