"Lipstick on a Pig" Used by McCain Regarding Hillary

The McCain campaign is lashing out at Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama for likening "change" on a McCain-Palin ticket to putting "lipstick on a pig," saying the line is an attack on vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and demanding an apology. According to CNN, however, this isn’t the first time that phrase has been used during this campaign season, and the first person to use it was John McCain.

Obama used the line in a speech addressing a crowd of followers in Virginia Tuesday evening. The speech, according to Obama staffers, was intended to respond to McCain’s recent claims that he is the real candidate for change.

"John McCain says he's about change too, and 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 something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing."

The McCain camp said the line was a direct attack on Palin, who famously told the crowd at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.: "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

Obama’s senior adviser Anita Dunn immediately responded to McCain’s demands for an apology, saying this was “a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy -- the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan just last year.”

Then reporters at CNN did some digging, tracing the use of the phrase throughout this campaign season back to John McCain last October. According to CNN, McCain used the phrase at a campaign stop while referring to Hillary Clinton’s 1993 failed health care plan.

"I think they put some lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig," McCain said.

He did it again, CNN reports, in May, while essentially accepting the Republican presidential nomination.

In fact, a former McCain staffer even named a book after the popular political catchphrase. Torie Clarke, who earlier this year advised the McCain campaign, penned the recently released Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game.

It seems Obama has an unlikely ally in this back-and-forth. McCain supporter Mike Huckabee, who himself made a go at the Republican nomination earlier this year, took Obama’s side while appearing on conservative talk show Hannity & Colmes.

"It's an old expression, and I'm going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one,” he said on the show. “I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin; he didn't reference her. If you take the two sound bites together, it may sound like it. But I've been a guy at the podium many times, and you say something that's maybe a part of an old joke and then somebody ties it in. So I'm going to have to cut him slack." (Ross von Metzke, The Advocate)