Is the pot calling the kettle… uh… um… Let’s move on.
By mw | Related entries in Barack, Palin, Partisan NonsenseSorry Justin, I didn’t get the memo requiring mandatory postings for lipstickonapiggate. I see that you, Doug, and Alan have already weighed in, all good posts, and the view is pretty much unanimous, so let me get mine out of the way, so we can indeed move on.
I don’t actually disagree with what any of what my fellow Donklebloggers had to say. However, as I am congenitally predisposed to swimming upstream, I will use my required entry to present the contrarian view.
Yes, as Alan and Doug point out, the phrase “lipstick on a pig” is an idiom in common use. So is “pot calling the kettle black” so is “lets call a spade a spade“. Does that mean it is acceptable or smart for McCain to use those common idioms in this campaign? I don’t think so.
Brian Pick at QandO explores that question:
“…then he makes the “lipstick on a pig” comment, about which I will grant that it is possible he wasn’t referring to Palin. But since she so recently made her “lipstick” joke a national buzzline, he should have known in the moment he said it (either the moment it entered his head, or the moment the crowd started laughing and whooping) or he’s not half as smart as we’ve been led to believe. And after that, he immediately tacks on a line about an “old fish”. If he wasn’t intending those two comments, strung together, to be a reference to Palin and McCain, he could have fooled the crowd that was listening to him: they made the connections right away.
If McCain had made some offhand comment like, “Barack Obama is criticizing me for being more partisan than I want people to think I am. Well, that’s kinda like the pot calling the kettle black,” that would have sunk him immediately. Never mind that it’s a common phrase. The standard in politics (and governance) is that you don’t make comments that can very easily be taken the wrong way. If he intended it as a reference to Palin, he’s stupid and he’s being punished for it right now. If he didn’t intend it a reference to Palin, he’s still stupid and he’s still being punished for it right now.
The die was cast in this particularly “politically correct” campaign season during the Clinton Obama primary contest. Then – by general agreement of the Democratic Party at large – we learned that anyone voting against Clinton was sexist and anyone voting against Obama was racist.
Is the McCain campaign risking looking as foolish now as the Democrats did during the primary? Oh yeah. But there is a political upside that the campaign would also be foolish to overlook. When there is a question about potentially racist, sexist, or ageist comments, the tie usually goes to the affronted party. Judging from this, this, this and this – there are plenty of Democratic women (and some Democratic men) who took exception to Obama’s statement – Liberal, Democratic, feminist women. You know, the kind of Clinton supporters that Obama would like to keep in his camp and McCain would like to take away.
I agree that it was unnecessary and foolish for the McCain campaign to pile on. If your opposition is deep in a hole and still digging, don’t interrupt.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 and is filed under Barack, Palin, Partisan Nonsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 10th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Well he did and played right into Obama’s hands, now Obama’s camopaign can bring up McCains sexist remarks, while Obama gets to decry the politics of distration and the silly season, and how McCain refuses to stick to the issues. And it helps tunr the media focus against McCain and Palin, already so many in the media are calling McCain out on this and the sex ad.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
” we learned that anyone voting against Clinton was sexist and anyone voting against Obama was racist.”
Um, what? It would behoove you to do your due diligence and not make grand, unsubstantiated insults about the entire electorate.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
With all due respect, mw, I’m not understanding your point here. Are you arguing that certain idioms are off limits in this campaign? Are you saying that Obama was obviously being offensive and it’s wrong to argue otherwise? Or are you just saying it’s politically savvy for McCain to overreact?
Whatever the case, I hate whining. I didn’t like it when Obama’s supporters acted all affronted by the New Yorker cartoon and I don’t like seeing McCain and his supporters playing the same “oh, how COULD you” game with this silly “controversy.”
It has, however, supplied all 4 of Donklephant’s most frequent contributors with something to write about. So, you know, it’s got that going for it.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
LOL, that is just deliciously ironic how CaptainUltimate does not recoginze how obviously tongue in cheek those couple of lines are in mw’s post … and is offended by it … priceless.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Actually, (and I’m an Obama supporter) to some extent this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black …
The Obama team did get months of mileage out of that whole “100 years of war” quote.
… which was obviously taken out of context.
Not quite the same thing … but still
September 10th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
@Todd
I was also amused, and deeply disturbed. I blame the use of emoticons. It appears to me that we now have an entire generation, maybe two generations, that are completely incapable of parsing a sentence in context and detecting sarcasm, irony, or satire without being signaled by one of these ;)
I have even seen on-line writers resort to the use of tags –
SARCASM> I despair for the future of the English language. /SARCASM
September 10th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
apologies. I’ll read closer next time
September 10th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Actually, yes I was making a variation of all three of those points, and one more, which is three points too many for one short post. So let me list them here for clarity
1) It is stupid for any candidate to use idioms that can be misinterpreted when involved in a campaign that includes a woman, a black, and a senior citizen. However, the Irish Roman Catholic is fair game.
2) Obama knew exactly what he was doing and saying.
3) There was indeed a potential political advantage for McCain out of this Obama gaffe.
4) The McCain campaign’s ham-handed effort to capitalize on that advantage with that stupid ad negated any possible advantage and probably created a net negative backlash.
And I agree the campaign came across as whining. They should have let the PUMA’s do the whining for them.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Anyone who believes that Obama was doing what McCain is claiming he did is a moronic doofus or a McCain surrogate, whether official or unofficial. Or of course they could just be lying. John McCain is certainly lying. Sara Palin is lying. Their defenders are also lying. This is one of the big things that turned me against the Republican Party. It started when Ronald Reagan promised that he would cut taxes, raise defense spending and balance the budget all at the same time. It’s only gone downhill from there.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:10 am
I think you raise good points, except for the fact that McCain used the exact same metaphor to describe Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. They’re just playing fast and lose with the truth.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:50 am
This whole controversy represents, to me, everything that’s wrong with elections. We should be talking about real issues, not lipstick.
With that said let me contribute…:)
mw, I think you make some good points that has changed a little how I think about this. I still think McCain over-reacted, but these are the points that make me think:
1) the “old fish” comment right after. Of course, it might have been just coincidental, but it makes it harder to argue that. Let’s take a look at the whole statement:
“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”
Is there any doubt here that the fish represents McCain? Is this a common idiom (I ask honestly, I’ve never heard it but it could be)? Is it just coincidence that he chose to compare McCain to an old fish, instead of choosing some other analogy that doesn’t involve age? I think it’s hard to argue that he isn’t trying to remind people about his age with this comment, or at least his long Washington experience.
So if he’s talking about McCain with the “old fish” comment, it makes it harder to argue that it wasn’t Palin he was referring to with the “lipstick” comment.
Still, the whole thing is probably just a horrible coincidence and McCain needs to chill, which brings me to the next point:
2) If McCain said… “pot calling the kettle black” referring to Obama… he would be in big trouble. I would be just as upset with people getting all upset about it, but the truth is some democrats would run with it and feign the same outrage. Heck, we’ve already seen people saying there are “racist undertones” to certain things McCain and Palin have said that have nothing to do with race, so I shudder to think what would happen if McCain actually used the word “black” when talking about Obama, even in a common idiom.
With that out of my head, I’m perfectly happy moving on and pretending this whole thing never happened.