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.

Some Questions on Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day weekend is the traditional kickoff for a presidential campaign (as well as the start of football season).

And, now that Sarah Palin has been designated to be John McCain's running mate, there are some new (or at least revised) questions to be asked — and answered — before November 4.

• On the matter of experience — it's true that Barack Obama has been in the U.S. Senate less than four years.
  
  It's also true that Palin has been governor of Alaska less than two years.
  
  And, back when he was a candidate for president, Joe Biden made a remark about how the presidency didn't lend itself to "on-the-job training."
  
  Actually, Biden was wrong about that. He's been in the Senate for 35 years, but he has no executive experience. Palin is the only candidate with executive experience. And that experience is comparable to the presidency — at best.
  
  This is something the presidency has in common with many professions.
  
  It has always been a job that its occupants had to learn as they went along.
  
  A new president may bring experience to the job that can be transferred to his/her new responsibilities — much like someone changing careers in the private sector (i.e., you may not have personal experience with the computer software that is used by your new employer, but perhaps you have comparable software experience in a previous job).
  
  But, really, is there any job (even the vice presidency) that can adequately prepare someone for the burdens of the presidency? Even the modern vice presidency, which has a more active role in the executive branch than it did even 40 years ago?
  
  In my lifetime, I've seen presidents who brought a wide variety of backgrounds to the Oval Office. They've come to the White House after working in the law, business, education, farming, acting. And most had served or were serving in government before they became president.
  
  He was before my time, but Harry Truman may have had the most varied résumé of any of our presidents. He was regarded as a failure in just about everything he tried before running for public office, and he wasn't popular when he left the presidency, but he is remembered as one of America's better presidents today — which is a tribute to the soundness of his decisions.
  
  (One of those decisions — to desegregate the armed forces — may have hastened the arrival of the day we recently witnessed — Obama's acceptance of the presidential nomination.)
  
  For a time, Obama was a "community organizer." Palin worked for a time in commercial fishing.
  
  Some of the presidents in my lifetime (including the president at the time of my birth, Dwight Eisenhower) served in the military — at least, for awhile.
  
  But I know of no profession that provides foolproof preparation for the presidency.
  
  Does anyone know of a job in which one can fine-tune all the skills needed to negotiate treaties, compile federal budgets, exercise vetoes, lobby for legislation, serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces — and perform all the other tasks required of a president?
  
  Syndicated columnist Richard Reeves addresses the subject of experience in his latest column. "Is Barack Obama prepared to be president?" he asks. "No. Neither is John McCain."
  
  And then he elaborates. "The presidency is an act of faith."
  
  Amen.


• Now that Palin has been picked to be McCain's running mate — and responses to the decision are coming in — Rebecca Traister wonders, in Salon.com, if Obama should have chosen Hillary Clinton to be his running mate.
  
  After reciting the litany of "pluses" Palin reportedly brings to McCain's quest for the presidency — and acknowledging that "Palin presents some stomach-churning possibilities for Democrats" — Traister opines that "even a cursory glance at Palin's positions should be enough to warn Democratic women (and men) to stay far, far away."
  
  Traister goes on to observe, "If the Palin selection brings female voters to the McCain camp, there is likely to be a round of second-guessing about whether Obama read the tea leaves wrong and missed an opportunity to shore up his divided party more effectively by going with, or at least seriously considering, Clinton."


• Along a similar line, Republican activist Bill Kristol writes, in the Weekly Standard, that Palin frightens those on the left of the political spectrum.
  
  As the conservative Palin pursues the vice presidency in the next nine weeks, writes Kristol, "she'll be swimming in political waters infested with sharks."
  
  But Kristol goes on to observe that Palin's nickname, as the point guard for her high school's championship basketball team, was "Sarah Barracuda."
  
  "I suspect she'll take care of herself better than many expect," Kristol writes, although he acknowledges that there will be some "rocky moments" — as there inevitably are when a novice is thrust into the national spotlight.


• Tim Rutten writes, in the Los Angeles Times, that Palin's nomination may focus the debate on domestic issues — like abortion and gun rights.
  
  But even domestic issues can't be completely divorced from foreign issues, including foreign trade. Palin's nomination may also expand the debate on domestic oil drilling — an issue that clearly overlaps into America's trade relationships with the world's oil producers.
  
  Rutten suggests that the talk of McCain trying to appeal to Hillary Clinton's supporters by nominating a woman for vice president may be overblown. "Clinton's admirers feel about her as they do not just because she's a woman," he says, "but because she's a particular sort of woman."
  
  And he goes on to observe that "Palin is emphatically not that sort of woman."
  
  So, as I mentioned yesterday, perhaps this pick is not intended to appeal to women who voted for Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Perhaps it is intended to keep women who have been voting Republican in recent elections from bolting to the other side — as President Eisenhower's granddaughter did.
  
  There are many "perils of Palin," as Rutten says, and they're not all perils that Democrats face. The greatest peril for McCain, in gambling on a somewhat unknown quantity as his running mate, may be that "[i]f she isn't careful, Palin could emerge from [her debate with Biden] looking a lot like Dan Quayle in drag."


• It seems to me that, if nothing else, the 2008 election marks the emergence on the national stage of the two states that were admitted to the Union the year I was born — Alaska and Hawaii.
  
  Obama, of course, was born in Hawaii. And Palin is the governor of Alaska.
  
  Both states have been political afterthoughts for most of the nearly 50 years they've been states. Hawaii has 4 electoral votes and nearly always supports the Democratic nominee. Alaska has 3 electoral votes and nearly always supports the Republican nominee.
  
  No political observers are suggesting any shifts in allegiances in those states.