LEBANON, Va. — A day of tussling in the presidential campaign ended Tuesday with a fight over, of all things, lipstick-wearing pigs.
Sen. John McCain’s campaign accused Sen. Barack Obama of calling Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a pig and demanded he apologize. Obama aides insisted he made no such remark about the Republican vice presidential nominee.
The dust-up started when Obama ridiculed McCain’s pledge to bring change to a White House that Republicans have controlled for nearly eight years.
“John McCain says he’s about change, too,” Obama told a crowd. “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 the same thing something different. But you can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, and it’s still going to stink after eight years.”
With that, McCain’s newly organized “Palin Truth Squad” jumped into action. Jane Swift, the former governor of Massachusetts, said Obama was alluding to Palin’s joke last week that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was lipstick. In a call with reporters, Swift demanded an apology from the Democratic presidential nominee.
“Ultimately, I think the American people will realize that calling a very prominent female governor of one of our states a pig is not exactly what we want to see when we have supposedly — are going to have this great debate that is the politics of hope,” Swift said.
But Mike Huckabee, a McCain opponent in the primaries, said he did not believe Obama was calling Palin a pig. “It’s an old expression, and I’m going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one,” Huckabee told Fox News.
Anita Dunn, a senior Obama campaign adviser, called the attack on the Democrat’s pig remark “a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy.”
“This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run,” she said.
McCain, too, has invoked pigs in criticizing opponents. When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton released her health-care plan last year, the Arizona senator portrayed it as a remake of the one she proposed when her husband, Bill Clinton, was president. “‘I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” McCain said.
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