'Lipstick' Flap Gets A 'Reality Check'

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Sep 10, 2008 9:44 pm US/Mountain

'Lipstick' Flap Gets A 'Reality Check'

Written By Raj Chohan

Reporting
Raj Chohan

DENVER (CBS4) ―

Click to enlarge 1 of 2: Presidential hopefuls Sen. Barack Obama, l, and Sen. John McCain.
Justin Sullivan, Robert Spencer/Getty Images
Click to enlarge 2 of 2: About Reality Check: Raj Chohan focuses on matters of public policy and political persuasion. Online, he features his sources & an outline of his investigative steps on the pathway to his conclusions.

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John McCain and Barack Obama are trading barbs over women's cosmetics, and we in the media will spend a few days parsing sound bites to determine whether someone was being sexist.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin set the stage during her show stopping acceptance speech when she compared hockey moms to pit bulls.

Gov. Palin: You know what they say is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick!

Sarah Palin is proud of her "pit bull with lipstick" reputation. It was one of the better lines of her widely watched acceptance speech.

What's the problem? When Barack Obama recently tried to turn a variation of the "lipstick" phrase against John McCain's economic policies, he stepped into a trap he should have seen coming.

Sen. Obama: You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

Shortly after Obama made that comment, the McCain camp reacted with ostensible outrage and indignation, suggesting that Obama had called Sarah Palin a pig. The McCain campaign even fired off a new ad, which opened with the following statement read by a female voice, juxtaposed over a black-and-white image of Obama.

Ad: The attacks on Governor Palin have been called completely false.

Here's the spin. The McCain campaign is hoping to capitalize on the bump the ticket recently got among working class white women who seem to like Sarah Palin but don't like the personal attacks against her, particularly those critiques that focused on Palin's status as a mother. For McCain, the gender play has been an effective tactic. But in this context it rings hollow. What's really going on here is that Barack Obama took Sarah Palin's lipstick metaphor, and changed the punch line to attack McCain's policies. Obama probably thought he was being clever, and blew it, ham-handedly creating an opening for the McCain campaign to pounce on a vulnerable pressure point. But fair-minded people, aware of the full context of Obama's comments, will almost certainly conclude the Illinois senator was not calling Sarah Palin a pig.