Wow. I don’t pay attention to the campaign for one day and look what I missed. I just heard about the lipstick kerfuffle this morning. Now that I have seen the McCain ad, I have to say that I am disappointed that his campaign went so far to make this a serious issue. What bothers me is that is was perfectly clear what Obama was saying and it had nothing to do with Sarah Palin. The icing on the cake was the ad itself, in which it said on the screen, “Barack Obama on Sarah Palin” before launching in to the clip of the lipstick comment. That is misleading and dishonest. Not a great moment for the McCain campaign. They compounded their mistake by trotting out our former governor Jane Swift as part of their Truth Squad. I have to agree 100% with National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuro,
Don’t they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are trashing her brand. They’re undermining the basis of her appeal as a different, tougher kind of female politician. Today has been worse than wasted.
Having Jane Swift lead the McCain campaign’s Palin Truth Squad is an additional mistake. It’s not just that she was an incompetent and unpopular governor of Massachusetts, although she was, and had nothing like Palin’s credentials as a reformer. Her administration was a failure in significant part because of her inability to walk the line between public and private, work and family. She was the last female governor before Palin to be prominent for being pregnant in office, and she made a hash of things, using state aides as babysitters. Couldn’t the campaign have found someone who wasn’t such a counter-example to Palin?