Click here to watch "Embrace."

Two weeks’ worth of ads skewering Barack Obama as “the biggest celebrity in the world” seem to have gotten under the Illinois senator’s skin. Today he seeks to turn the tables on John McCain with a new TV ad calling the Arizona senator "Washington’s biggest celebrity." Those are worse, the ad implies, because they use their positions of power to win favors for the bigwigs and special interests they schmooze with.

"Embrace" (subscription) fuses the "celebrity" theme that has dominated the last couple weeks of campaign coverage with Obama’s message that McCain is an integral part of a broken system and would represent a continuation of the Bush presidency. The spot plays up McCain’s “decades” in Washington while showing him in the spotlight on "Saturday Night Live," "The View" and elsewhere. An announcer says that "as Washington embraced him, John McCain hugged right back," accompanied by video of McCain hugging President Bush.

The spot links McCain with what the Obama campaign has portrayed as the most nefarious aspects of Washington politics -- lobbyists, drug and oil companies -- while claiming that he would do nothing for average families. The announcer suggests that McCain has flip-flopped on policy, "lurching to the right, then the left" -- "the old Washington dance." Returning to another familiar theme, the ad concludes by accusing McCain of playing "the same old Washington games” with voters.

The fact that the Obama campaign feels the need to respond to McCain's "celebrity" ads, however, demonstrates that McCain might have landed a punch. While Obama has been trying to make this election a referendum on Bush and, by extension, the Republican Party, McCain has been successful over the last several weeks in making Obama the focus of media and public scrutiny. "If the celebrity issue were not hurting them, they would have ignored it," GOP strategist Terry Holt told the Associated Press.

"Embrace" will run on national cable stations starting today. But the Obama campaign has also released several ads targeting local issues in small media markets this week.

"Motorcycle" (subscription), a radio ad responding to a comment by McCain at last week's Sturgis biker rally in South Dakota, targets working-class voters in Milwaukee, where Harley-Davidson is based, and in York, Pa., which boasts the company’s largest manufacturing center. The spot plays audio of McCain telling bikers: "Not long ago, a couple of hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day." But, the announcer proclaims, "American-made motorcycles like Harleys don't matter to John McCain," who, as a staunch proponent of free trade, has opposed programs that make it mandatory for the government to buy American-made products. The announcer also claims that "back in Washington," McCain "supported billions in tax breaks for companies who ship American jobs overseas."

Meanwhile, the campaign also released a new TV spot in Las Vegas and Reno, Nev. "Backyard" (subscription) contrasts the candidates' positions on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility, claiming that Obama "opposes opening Yucca" while McCain is all for it. The spot shows a clip of a 2007 TV interview in which McCain responded to a question of whether he would "be comfortable with nuclear waste coming through Arizona" on its way to Nevada by saying he would not. "He's not worried about nuclear waste in our state -- only in Arizona," the announcer charges.

Yucca Mountain is a hot-button issue in Nevada, a state that MSNBC places in the toss-up category this election cycle.