An Associated Press story this week listed Montana as one of seven Republican-leaning states -- the others are North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia, North Caroline, Virginia and Indiana -- that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is pouring money and manpower into as new battlegrounds in the campaign.

It's an unfamiliar position for Montanans, who are accustomed to being more or less ignored by presidential campaigns. But there is one element that still sets Montana, as well as North Dakota and Alaska, apart from most of the nation's other battleground states. In a contest featuring the first African American with a good chance of winning the presidency, Montana lacks a history of black-white strife and racism that inevitably will be a quiet but unavoidable factor in the outcome.

In Montana, where African-Americans have been few and far between, that kind of racism just doesn't come up.

The fact that racism will be a part of the election campaign was made clear recently with John McCain's ad questioning -- at least on the surface -- Obama's fitness to be president. Comparing him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the ad scoffed at Obama's mere celebrity and asked, "Is he ready to lead?"

That was the conscious message, anyway. On an unconscious level, which is the level that matters, the juxtaposition of two celebrity women with Obama was calculated to raise the same sort of emotions as those Willie Horton ads did against Michael Dukakis. On the surface, the Willie Horton ads were about being soft on crime. At an emotional level, they were about Americans' basest fears.

We suspect that kind of emotional button pushing will have a much smaller impact in places like Montana. We'd like to think so, anyway.