What Will Suffice

Speaking of discourse: Obama went there, and used the phrase “lipstick on a pig” at a rally yesterday. Oh yes, I know, he meant to attack the McCain/Palin’s claims to the mantle of “change,” not Palin specifically. Of course, Palin is the only reason McCain can now talk about change without looking like an utter fool, and as such the two aren’t precisely separable. And as everyone remembers from a short two weeks ago, “The only difference between a bulldog and a hockey mom is lipstick.” No matter how often Obama’s used the phrase in the past, in this news cycle the connection is swift and obvious.

So any speechwriter or adviser or for that matter, candidate, is smart enough to know that the press will go straight for any such remark as plainly referring to Palin. Even your average political rally audience is going to. Even assuming they were not that smart, you have to ask yourself what kind of dialogue is going on internally in a campaign that they are insensitive to the sexist overtones in an expression that only a few short months ago were being used against their own damn primary candidate? It boggles the mind that anybody thought the power of this phrase was worth the risk of using it.

Don’t get me wrong. John “At least I don’t put my make-up on like a trollop, you cunt” McCain gets no credibility with me when he cries sexism, particularly since it is he who started this whole lipstick on a pig nonsense against Clinton.

But it by no means excuses this asinine misstep that McCain is a hypocrite here. Obama rose to the bait the Republican party laid out for him – and he’s the one running on the platform about changing the way we talk about politics. It’s actually not that hard to practice what you preach in this instance – despite the anti-political-correctness brigade’s assertions, it’s really not that hard to avoid sexist and racist language if you would genuinely like to do so.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, indeed.