Absurdities of the Campaign Trail: "Lipstick on a Pig"

“You know that, because you’re stupid but you’re not stupid, you know what I’m saying?”

Press Secretary C.J. Cregg said that on Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant series, The West Wing, to a reporter who was over eager to distort the facts of a situation to make a good story. It’s one thing to misinterpret or not understand something the way it was meant, but quite another to maliciously distort something by pretending that you didn’t get the meaning. That’s stupid on a whole other level.

This week, the cynical, dirty campaign being waged by the flailing McCain camp did just that because when you can’t win on the issues, you try to change the story. It wasn’t so long ago that a McCain spokesperson said that this wasn’t going to be a campaign about issues but about personality. The problem with that is that Barack Obama has a great personality, which the McCain camp has oft been quick to point out as a flaw because of his “rock star” status and his cult of personality. It is his personality that draws 84,000 people to a stadium in Denver to hear him speak, and to donate record amounts of money in small incrememnts to his campagin. Just the latest in the attacks designed to distort people’s views of his personality, next in line after “elitist” and “presumptuous,” comes from the McCain’s just-launched and Orwellian-named “Palin Truth Squad.”

Today they are attacking Senator Obama for calling Sarah Palin a pig. What’s that you say? “That doesn’t seem at all like something Barack Obama would do, not after saying her family should be off limits and after the clean campaign he has run?” Well, even if you didn’t say that, you should have, because you would be correct. Barack Obama did not call her a pig. Something like that should be pretty obvious though, right? Either someone says “she’s a pig” or they don’t.

What he did say, was this when discussing the McCain campaign’s attempts to paint their ticket as a ticket of change: “You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Just in case someone wasn’t sure what he was refering to, he continued: “You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change.’ Iit’s still gonna stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing! It’s time to bring about real change to Washington. And that’s the choice you’ve got in this election.”

He laid it all out right there, he was talking about change, and how saying you’re for change doesn’t mean that there is any substance beneath that veneer. He does that by using folksy colloguialisms, something that George Bush has done repeatedly and which has been credited with winning him support from voters who want their President to seem “just like them.” Could it be that the “Truth Squad” doesn’t know what a colloguialism is? A quick refresher…

A colloguialism is a phrase not used in formal speech or language, and is often meant to convey meaning that is not strictly dictated by the literal interpretation of the phrase. In this case, putting “lipstick on a pig” means to “make the unattractive superficially attractive,” or “to dress up an idea and try to pass it off as something else.” Literally, that while makeup is usually associated with people making themselves more attractive, that when applied to a pig, it would make the pig neither attractive nor a person. It’s a phrase that’s not actually about pigs, but about how tihngs are viewed and about tactics.

So does McCain’s camp not know this colloquialism, or are they playing deliberately dim? For a clue, you need go no farther than McCain himself, who said about Hillary Clinton’s proposed health care plan during the primaries: “I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” No one then thought he was calling Hillary a pig, and certainly he wasn’t intending anyone to. No, John McCain was saying that he thought her “new” health care plan was exactly like her old health care plan that failed to gain support back in 1992. It was an attack on her ideas, not on her physical appearance.

So John McCain is familiar with the expression and how it’s used, as is his former press secretary who used it as the title to a book, “Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No Spin Era.” Clearly the Spin Era isn’t quite over, though, since the “Truth Squad” is now trying to spin Barack’s remarks and turn them into a sexist attack. Speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, former Gov. Jane Swift (who’s last name can’t help but remind you of a certain Swift Boat campaign to distort reality), said that she was certain Barack was calling Sarah Palin a pig because “She’s the only of the four candidates...that wears lipstick.” Let’s follow this trail of logic: the word “lipstick” was in the sentence, Sarah Palin wears lipstick, i.e. the sentence was about Sarah Palin exclusively. She also said that she expected an apology and, if he wasn’t refering to Sarah Palin and was calling John McCain a pig, then he should apologize for that too. I really hope Jane Swift isn’t actually that foolish to think Barack Obama was actually calling anyone a pig and that his reference to lipstick was a reference to a woman, because if so, I worry for the people of Massachusetts who she governed. Just to put an exclamation point on that thought, she also commented that Barack’s reference to wrapping an old fish in a paper called “change” was calling John McCain an “old fish.”

So either the “Truth Squad” is remarkably stupid, or equally malicious, and either way they are not fit for the duty of protecting the truth. This “MiniTruth” of the McCain/Palin campaign should leave the real reporting and investigating to journalists and not paid campaign spinmeisters. One of those journalists pointed out to Jane Swift that McCain had used similar phrases himself, such as when he refered to Gov. Romney’s attacks on him during the primary and stated “Never get into a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” When the journalist asked Jane Swift if she thought Mr. McCain was calling Romney a pig, she said “Of course not.”

Of course not.