Lipstick on a Pig?

Once again, the voters are being distracted from the important issues.

The efforts by both the parties and the pundits to keep alive the battle between racism and misogyny got a lung full of fresh air with the Sarah Palin nomination.

And, apparently, that debate will continue until, as former President Clinton famously said, "the last dog dies."

Or should that be pit bull?

Either way, we now have less than eight weeks to talk about the real issues before we go to the polls.

Are we going to talk about them at all?

”Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama’s coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats,” writes Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Times, ”because Obama has gone from cool to cold.”

Friedman contends that Obama needs to connect with voters on a ”gut level,” in the same way he connected with them during the primaries.

Friedman thinks Obama lost that connection in recent weeks. And now, he writes, John McCain is in position to sprint to the finish line and win the 2008 election ”with a 50-pound ball called ‘George W. Bush’ wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called ‘The U.S. Economy’ wrapped around the other.”

He mentions what may be at the heart of the Democrats’ problem — the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.

It’s true, as Friedman says, that Democrats should ”take her very seriously.”

In terms of demographics alone, Palin brings more to the Republican ticket than Obama brings to the Democratic ticket.

Blacks have been voting heavily for Democrats for generations. White women have been voting Republican for a long time, but their numbers have been dwindling in recent years.

Perhaps it’s the volatility of the women’s vote that is responsible, but there seems to be an extreme sensitivity to comments that might not provoke much response if all the candidates were male.

For example, Republicans have demanded that Obama apologize for saying that McCain’s promise to produce change was an attempt to ”put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.”

It was alleged to be an offensive reference to Palin’s line about lipstick being the difference between a ”hockey mom” and a pit bull.

But Obama’s line was not new — for either presidential nominee. Last year, Obama used the phrase in reference to the Iraq War, McCain used it to refer to the differences between Hillary Clinton’s 1993 health care plan and the one she advocated in her race for the nomination in 2008, and other well-known politicians have used the phrase as well, including Vice President Cheney.

The uproar over the ”lipstick on a pig” comment is merely the latest example of how easily a campaign for the presidency can be diverted from a discussion of important issues.

Even so, there’s no denying that many women look at Palin and see someone whose life resembles their own in many ways — whether they agree with her on all, or even some, of the issues.

”As Neil Oxman, political consultant at The Campaign Group, put it to me,” writes Friedman, ”[f]or half the country, ‘Sarah Palin is Roseanne from the Roseanne show. Roseanne was the No. 1 comedy five years in a row and seven out of nine in the top 10.’”

The Roseanne analogy isn’t bad. Roseanne was a role model for working-class women in the 1990s. Her character demonstrated that a woman could be tough and still retain the caring, nurturing side of her personality.

It reminds me of something I heard frequently in George W. Bush’s campaigns for the presidency — he was the candidate, it was said, with whom voters would prefer to drink a beer.

Maybe Palin is the candidate with whom they’d like to go bowling.