White House Candidates Go to War Over a Pig With Lipstick

At least you can say it would never have happened had a woman not been running for vice-president: "lipstick" has become a buzzword in US politics.It smeared itself all over the news yesterday when it appeared that Barack Obama was likening Sarah Palin to a farmyard animal: "You can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig," he told a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Virginia. In the wake of the much-aired joke Palin had made about herself during her speech to the Republican convention last week - "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick" - it seemed clear to some that the Democrat was slinging insults at his rival.

Except he wasn't. The "lipstick on a pig" phrase is a fairly commonly used American idiom of long standing, indicating an attempt to jazz up some old goods with a cosmetic tweak. Obama's remarks came in the context of a longer attack on McCain's attempt to position himself as a force for change in Washington. The fuller quote from the Virginia meeting goes, "That's not change. That's just calling the same thing something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper and call it change; it's still going to stink."

Obama used the same phrase, talking about General Petraeus' task in Iraq, in an interview with the Washington Post last year. In April, Elizabeth Edwards (wife of former presidential hopeful John Edwards) used it to describe McCain's health care plan.

Nor do Democrats have sole rights to pig and lipstick-based analogies. Dick Cheney used it about John Kerry in 2004. Torie Clarke, McCain's former press secretary, wrote a book called Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era. And even McCain has called on it, using it last year to attack one of Hillary Clinton's proposed policies: "I think they put some lipstick on a pig," he said, "but it's still a pig."

He must have a short memory, however, because the Republicans wasted no time in taking carefully orchestrated offense at the "gendered" comparison of Palin to a pig. Which, let's not forget, didn't happen. The Obama campaign responded by calling the McCain team "dishonorable".

Now that, my friends, is an insult.