The Note: Lipstick on a Campaign

Sept. 11, 2008— -- Cue the serial condemnations: It's unfair, dirty, nasty, despicable politics. We all hate it, and it has no place in a presidential campaign.

It also just might work.

Team McCain is in over-the-top outrage mode -- shocked, offended, and aghast at the sexism, ageism, fill-in-the-blank-ism being directed at John McCain and Sarah Palin, real and (more than slightly) imagined.

Good luck keeping track of all the indignities (and the McCain campaign would prefer that you didn't try to keep score).

"Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign launched a broadside against Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, accusing him of a sexist smear, comparing his campaign to a pack of wolves on the prowl against the GOP vice presidential pick, charging that the Democratic nominee favored sex education for kindergartners, and resurrecting the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.," Jonathan Weisman and Peter Slevin write in The Washington Post.

McCain seems content to have the race focus on personality and process -- not, heavens forbid, actual real issues. "Another day. Another roll in the mud," writes the New York Daily News' Michael Saul.

By making discredited and untrue claims about Obama -- and pretending that outrageous, offensive things are being widely circulated about Palin by the Obama campaign -- Team McCain is pushing the limits of its claim to an open, honest, positive campaign.

"I just can't wait for the moment when John McCain -- contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat -- talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment," Time's Joe Klein writes. "Talk about putting lipstick on a pig."

"Tactically, it is clear, and it has been frequently noted, that McCain learned well the lessons from his last run in 2000," ABC's Andy Fies writes. "McCain may want to keep Bush at a distance . . . but not his tactics."

"McCain's campaign called Obama's 'disturbing,' 'desperate,' 'offensive,' and 'disgraceful.' Obama's campaign fired back with 'pathetic, 'perverse,' 'dishonorable,' and 'shameful,' " The Boston Globe's Scott Helman reports. "Though McCain has more often been the aggressor, the back-and-forth -- to borrow a recent McCain campaign description of Obama running mate Joe Biden -- has reached 'a new low.' "

Yet here's the point: Obama taking Palin's bait is Obama shrinking in the public eye.

"It's a matchup he'll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he's running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president," Karl Rove writes in his Wall Street Journal column. "If Mr. Obama keeps attacking Mrs. Palin, he could suffer the fate of his Democratic predecessors. These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin résumé, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job, and diminish him -- not her."

No groove in sight: "McCain allies think they have succeeded in knocking Obama on his heels since he accepted his party's nomination in Denver two weeks ago," Weisman and Slevin report in the Post.

Said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: "They really are in a meltdown."

Maybe not quite, but they are scrambling -- and did Obama make anything better by trying to explain the "lipstick on a pig" remark on Letterman?

"Keep in mind that, technically had I meant it this way -- she would be the lipstick," Obama told a slightly confused Letterman, per ABC's Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller. "The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig. . . . I mean, just following the logic of this illogical situation."

This is a political game (which is not to say it won't work): "To accommodate Sarah Palin, John McCain's Straight Talk Express has now installed a fainting couch. It's not for the vice-presidential candidate -- she's plenty tough -- but for McCain aides who are rapidly perfecting the act of expiring on the cushions on her behalf at every sign of perceived sexism," Slate's John Dickerson writes.

"John McCain's campaign people are said to be suffering hurt feelings over Barack Obama's comment that McCain's policies are like lipstick on a pig. (And they are asking you to give money to make it better.)," the AP's Calvin Woodward writes. "Don't cry for them. And don't believe Obama was upset on behalf of the middle class when McCain joked that a rich person is one who makes $5 million. These are hardened pols. Their sensibilities are not so meltingly tender."

"As anyone knows, lipstick can smear," Mark Silva writes in the Chicago Tribune.

"Enough," Obama said in Virginia Wednesday. "I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift Boat politics. Enough is enough."

The fact is that Obama never said what the McCain camp is saying he did: He did not call Sarah Palin a pig.

"The Obama campaign also pointed out that McCain used the same words -- 'lipstick on a pig' -- last October to describe Sen. Hillary Clinton's health care plan," ABC's Kate Snow and Jake Tapper report. "Obama is finding, however, that the presidential race is no longer a two-man -- or a two-person -- race, and Palin's entrance has changed the dynamic."

Maybe it's woken him up: "Obama has uncorked some thunderous lines in recent campaign stops, showing a measure of emotion the normally unflappable candidate has seldom displayed. His speeches are now laced with indignation as he argues that anyone who sees John McCain and Sarah Palin as vehicles for change is being duped," Peter Nicholas writes in the Los Angeles Times. "Feistiness is what many Democratic elected officials have longed to see."

Maybe it's just in time: "It's more than an increased anxiety," Doug Schoen, a former top Bill Clinton pollster, tells Politico's David Paul Kuhn and Bill Nichols. "It's a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them."

Newsweek's Howard Fineman adds up the Obama errors (non-kosher lipstick applications not included): "Declining to take federal financing for the general election. . . . Declining McCain's offer to hold ten town hall debates. . . . Failing to go all the way with the Clintons. . . . The 22-state strategy. . . . Failing to state a sweeping, but concrete, policy idea. . . . Remaining trapped in professor-observer speak. . . . Failing to attack McCain early."

David Broder urges calm on all sides: "An exaggerated optimism has swept through Republican ranks and an equally exaggerated gloom has infected the Democrats," he writes. Don't believe the polling swings: "I call those shifts 'suspiciously large,' not because I doubt the accuracy or the methodology on the surveys but because the years have taught me that such swerves in voter opinion are likely to be temporary."

Gail Collins isn't overreacting, either: "If the Obama brain trust seems relatively serene compared with its seething base, it's because they live in the Electoral College world, where the presidential race only takes place in a third of the country," she writes in her New York Times column. "One of the great things about this campaign is that both sides are convinced they're going to lose."