The McCain
campaign is lashing out at Democratic presidential hopeful
Barack Obama for likening "change" on a McCain-Palin ticket
to putting "lipstick on a pig," saying the line is an
attack on vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and
demanding an apology. According to CNN, however, this
isn't the first time that phrase has been used during
this campaign season, and the first person to use it was
John McCain.
Obama used the
line in a speech addressing a crowd of followers in
Virginia Tuesday evening. The speech, according to Obama
staffers, was intended to respond to McCain's
recent claims that he is the real candidate for
change.
"John McCain says
he's about change too, and so I guess his whole angle
is, 'Watch out, George Bush -- except for economic policy,
health care policy, tax policy, education policy,
foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics -- we're
really going to shake things up in Washington.'
"That's not
change. That's just calling something the same thing
something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig,
but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old
fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still
going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of
the same old thing."
The McCain camp
said the line was a direct attack on Palin, who famously
told the crowd at the Republican National Convention in St.
Paul, Minn.: "You know the difference between a hockey
mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."
Obama's
senior adviser Anita Dunn immediately responded to
McCain's demands for an apology, saying this
was "a pathetic attempt to play the gender card
about the use of a common analogy -- the same analogy that
Senator McCain himself used about Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton's health care plan just last year."
Then reporters at
CNN did some digging, tracing the use of the phrase
throughout this campaign season back to John McCain last
October. According to CNN, McCain used the phrase at a
campaign stop while referring to Hillary
Clinton's 1993 failed health care plan.
"I think they put
some lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig,"
McCain said.
He did it again,
CNN reports, in May, while essentially accepting the
Republican presidential nomination.
In fact, a former
McCain staffer even named a book after the popular
political catchphrase. Torie Clarke, who earlier this year
advised the McCain campaign, penned the recently
released Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin
Era by Someone Who Knows the Game.
It seems Obama
has an unlikely ally in this back-and-forth. McCain
supporter Mike Huckabee, who himself made a go at the
Republican nomination earlier this year, took
Obama's side while appearing on conservative
talk show Hannity & Colmes.
"It's an old
expression, and I'm going to have to cut Obama some
slack on that one," he said on the show. "I do
not think he was referring to Sarah Palin; he didn't
reference her. If you take the two sound bites
together, it may sound like it. But I've been a guy at the
podium many times, and you say something that's maybe
a part of an old joke and then somebody ties it in. So
I'm going to have to cut him slack." (Ross von Metzke,
The Advocate)
