Oink
1st woman: Oh, my God. I’m so upset. I made the most horrible Freudian slip.
2nd woman: What happened?
1st woman: I was having lunch with my mother. I meant to say, “Please pass the toast,” and instead I said, “You horrible woman. You’ve ruined my life.”
***
“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” Obama said during a town-hall style event here Tuesday night.
The comment played on Republican vice presidential candidate Palin’s joke during the Republican National Convention that the only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom was lipstick.
Obama has been hammering the Republican ticket for adopting his change mantra. “This is a guy who supported George Bush 90% of the time. What does that say about somebody’s judgment that they agree with George Bush 90% of the time?” he said.
“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change,’ it’s still going to stink,” Obama said. “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.”
***
My mother, back in the 1950s: When’s your baby due?
Woman: I’m not pregnant!
***
Did Barack Obama mean to call either McCain or Palin a pig or a rotten fish? Certainly a lot of people think he did. I don’t. I think this was nothing more than stupid talk. After all, both the expressions he used (or variations thereof) are fairly common currency. We all know what they mean: no matter how you try to prettify or sanitize something, it is what it is. Obama was making the point that, pretty Republican campaign speeches notwithstanding, he believes that Democrats will fundamentally disagree with the actual policies, positions and promises underneath the fancy Republican wrapping. It’s a valid point in a political campaign.
So, now I’ve exculpated Obama from the charge that he intentionally called his opponents pigs and stinking fish. But I’m not done.
What Obama did was still stupid and crude. As the American Thinker points out, this derogatory, careless way of speaking is typical of Obama under pressure and off teleprompter. It bespeaks a man without an elegant mind, a man who thinks in crude and ugly terms.
The speech also probably has even stronger Freudian elements, given the fact that Palin associated herself with lipstick when she interrupted her convention speech (charmingly, I thought) to throw in her hockey mom joke: “What’s the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom? Lipstick.”) The fact that Palin’s husband was a commercial fisherman (with Palin helping to run that enterprise), no doubt strengthened the subliminal connection Obama felt when throwing around images of pigs in lipstick and stinking fish.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that Obama’s audience happily put it’s own spin on things. It roared when it heard the “pig in lipstick” statement, something it wouldn’t have done if it understood what it heard merely as a colorful phrase referring to putting too good a face on something. The roar came about because, whether intentionally or subliminally, Obama painted in their willing minds a picture of Pig Palin in Lipstick.
It’s easy to overblow this whole thing by making far-reaching accusations about Obama’s explicit intentions. Frankly, we’ll never know his explicit intentions. But we don’t need to go that far. We know two things from what he said: he’s a crude speaker when under attack and unprotected by speech writers, and his audience is joyously willing to put the worst, most unflattering spin on anything that slips unguarded from his mouth. That doesn’t speak well either for the man or his followers.
