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McCain's lipstick attacks on Obama smudge campaign

Dan Janison | dan.janison@newsday.com

September 11, 2008

'Now it's getting really dirty," gasped the lead in one city paper.

"Now it's getting really stupid," might have been closer to the mark.

Barack Obama the other day equated John McCain's claim to represent change with putting lipstick on a pig - or wrapping old fish in a piece of paper and relabeling it.

Obama's statement was utterly conventional.

But in an audacious bid for victim status, the McCain campaign put lipstick on Obama's statement and dressed it up to resemble some outrageous slap at Sarah Palin.

The purported connection: Palin had said lipstick was the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull.

Sorry, but this makes the McCain camp sound whiny, politically correct, even knee-jerk-liberal. You know, feeling out the pea of sexism under many mattresses. You know, like the party that practices gender politics.

One Democratic operative acknowledged privately yesterday that this is just the kind of response his camp would have concocted if the positions were reversed.

Remember the key election rule: It's only OK when your side does it.

Of course, McCain himself used "lipstick on a pig" to describe the Hillary Clinton health plan. What if McCain had called Clinton a barracuda or a pit bull, back when he was asked by a supporter, "How do we beat the bitch ." In the cynicism of campaigns, the present context erases even the recent past.

Race, age, sex, experience - all are now in play at once. When Gov. David A. Paterson said this week he detected "overtones of potential racial coding" in the presidential campaign, the GOP decried it as an unjust "accusation of racism." The roles in the lipstick issue are reversed.

This becomes a gall contest.

Democrats are nervous, with reason. Their man has slipped in the polls. The partisans worry that the Rove-ian attacks will throw them off their game again, as in 2004 and 2000. The feared progression: Dukakis-Gore-Kerry-Obama. They fret: What is Obama doing to avoid this same fate? They ask: Will Obama take the initiative and go on the attack?

Fear stalks the GOP, too. Shielding Palin through victim status - she's under attack, a martyr to reform, a noble outsider - looks increasingly like a tactical pre-emptive strike. After a convention where the name Dick Cheney went largely unspoken, the only non-senator on either ticket, the governor of Alaska, became instantly important.

McCain is a Senate insider and his party has held the White House for eight years, most of them with a GOP Congress. So the pressure on Palin as a new public front is huge. And the myth of the reform-mom-warrior-giver-of-life change-agent is already showing wear. Consider:

As your run-of-the-mill New York legislator might do, Palin supplemented her $125,000 salary in her first 18 months in office by charging a travel per diem for 312 nights she spent at home, in Wasilla. She drew $16,951, with the rationale that her work station was in Juneau.

She hired a lobbyist to pursue those dreaded earmarks for Wasilla and promoted the bridge to nowhere when she was running for governor. Every pol knows that one person's pork is another's vital project.

There are several cases of her involvement in murky firings involving personal matters.

She said of subsequently indicted U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens: "I have great respect for the senator, and he needs to be heard across America. His voice, his experience, his passion, needs to be heard ... so Alaska can contribute more."

Viewed soberly, Palin emerges as an unexotic member of our political class. That - and the question of how Obama responds - form the ungroomed reality behind the lipstick affair.