Should Obama apologize to Palin?
by Jill Zuckman and Mike Dorning, updated at 9:30 pm.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift tonight denounced, in no uncertain terms, Barack Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” metaphor as he tried to tell voters why they shouldn’t believe John McCain and Sarah Palin when they say they represent change.
“I guess the formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn’t have happened too soon,” said Swift, who chairs the new rapid response group and demanded an apology from Obama on Palin’s behalf.
“You would think having gone through a hard fought primary with Sen. Clinton, the Obama team would have figured out how to respectfully engage in a debate,” said Swift, who described Obama’s comments as “the low road,” and said Obama’s aides and advisers have been similarly disrespectful.
Yet the Obama campaign just as swiftly objected to Swift’s objection, noting that McCain himself had once called Democrat Hillary Clinton’s health care plan “lipstick” on the “pig” of a health plan that she had advanced as first lady — and the Obama camp tonight accused the McCain camp of playing “the gender card.”
Swift seemed to find no humor in Obama’s words today, which she said were obviously aimed at Palin since she was the only one of four candidates in the race who wears lipstick.
In suburban Detroit, Obama said, perplexed, that the Republicans were trying to take away his mantra of change.
“How do they have the nerve to say it?” Obama asked. “When you’ve been supporting this current president, your party has been in power, and you’re not offering anything new, how is it that you’re serious about change? You’re not. It’s empty words. You’re just saying it because you realize, ‘Obama has been talking about change. That seems to be working. Maybe we should try to say it too.’”
And in Lebanon, Virginia, he said, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” as laughter erupted. “You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, but it’s still going to stink after eight years.”
It should be noted that during the Republican primary, McCain compared former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to a pig — as well as commenting on Clinton’s “lipstick” health-care plan. “Never get into a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty — and the pig likes it,” McCain said then, declining to respond to criticism leveled by Romney.
Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, in October, McCain had criticized the Democratic contenders for proposing what he called costly universal health care proposals requiring excess regulation. He had not studied Clinton’s health-care plan, he said, but it was “eerily reminiscent” of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.
“”I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” McCain said of Clinton’s proposal then.
“Enough is enough,” Obama senior adviser Anita Dunn said in a statement e-mailed to reporters this evening after Swift’s complaint about Obama.
“The McCain campaign’s attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy - the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care plan just last year,” she continued. “This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run.”
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