HAS the Barack Obama camp taken a leaf out of Vladimir Putin’s campaign book  with his “virginity” pastiche ad (see video below)?

The US President is targeting young voters with a racy video clip that bears  similarities to a campaign Putin released ahead of the Russian presidential  election in March.

Lena Dunham, the writer and star of television hit Girls, appears in  the Obama video, The First Time. “Your first time shouldn’t be with  just anybody,” Dunham tells viewers. “You want to do it with a great guy.”

Flogging the metaphor, she says “the first time” should be with someone who  cares about women and whether they get health insurance and birth control.

“My first time voting was amazing,” she says, finally making the metaphor  clear. “There’s a line in the sand. Before I was a girl, now I was a woman. I  went to the polling station, I pulled back the curtain. I voted for Barack  Obama.”

Fans of Girls, which has just started airing in Britain, won’t be surprised  to see Dunham endorsing Obama via an edgy, feminist monologue about sex, says New York magazine. But in the few hours that the ad has  been out, conservatives have already expressed outrage over the “disgusting” and  “astoundingly tasteless” clip.

Fox News analyst and conservative author Monica Crowley calls the ad “sick”  and “degrading” on Twitter, while RedState editor-in-chief Erick Erickson claims  the ad is “proof we live in a fallen world destined for hell fire”.

But as the Atlantic Wire points out, if conservatives really wanted a  cause for outrage they could have focused on the fact that “Obama stole the idea  from Putin”.

Putin used a similar concept in his election campaign earlier this  year. In an ad (see video below) that picked up 680,000 views on  YouTube, a young Russian woman is told by a fortune-teller that her “first time”  will be with Putin. The video ends with the woman entering a polling station and  the words: ‘Putin. Only for love the first time.’

“Now that’s the real crime,” says Atlantic Wire. “He had to steal from the  Russians.”

Putin video:

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