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.

Is It Safe to Have a Sense of Humor These Days?

Charlotte Allen's opinion piece in last week's Washington Post has provoked an angry response from women who were offended by its tone.

Ombudsman Deborah Howell writes, in today's Washington Post that she, along with "[t]housands of women," found Allen's article to have the "fatal flaw of not being funny."

Howell says, "[I]t's important for provocative opinion to be in the paper, especially in Outlook, which is all commentary. And this should have nothing to do with politics. Allen is a conservative, and Outlook should pay attention to conservative opinion."

She notes that her experience has taught her "to be wary of using humor, satire or irony about gender, race or religion." I can't argue with that. Certainly, the Democratic race for president has taught me the same lesson -- over and over and over. I've been getting that from both sides of the Democratic divide for many weeks now.

Whether one agrees with Allen or not, I thought it was long past time when Democrats needed to step back and laugh a little at themselves.

Howell seems to think Allen's piece went too far. "Readers come to the newspaper looking for news, facts, analysis, opinion and a little fun," writes Howell. "They do not come to The Post to be insulted, and the paper should not deliberately print anything offensive unless it is a matter of great news significance."

Everyone has an opinion, and The Huffington Post posted several opinions on this piece. Megan Pillow, for example, wrote that Allen's article made her realize that "sometimes vintage is just a fancy name for out-of-fashion. The article certainly marks the re-emergence of an antique, but in this case, what we get isn't a hip new comeback. Instead, we've been given a moth-eaten scrap of a concept dressed up in bloviated language and sold to the public for far more than it's worth."

The Huffington Post also posted the opinion of Jacqueline Leo, who appears to indulge in some stereotyping of her own in "The Self-Hating Shrew." Leo calls Allen's article "post-feminism on hyperbolic steroids from China -- an over-the-top rant with a dose of heavy-metal poison thrown in for effect."

Allen "goes on to attack Oprah Winfrey," Leo writes. "[M]aybe it's because Winfrey didn't go to Harvard and Stanford and yet she's still richer than Allen. Next on her list: Celine Dion. I assume ... because she's a Canadian and therefore a potential illegal immigrant or terrorist, not because she sings romantic ballads in contrast to the rap and heavy metal which no doubt dominate Allen's iPod."

Jason Linkins writes, in The Huffington Post, that Allen's internet "chat" last week in defense of her article was "a mind-bending trip inside the mind of a woman who has not exercised her critical-thinking muscles ... uhm ... ever. And her weird, nutball reasoning was hardly contained to matters of gender:"

Linkins, who is a political writer for the Washington Post, didn't bother to point out that Allen has written nearly 30 articles for the Post since 1993, and this is the first one in which her intelligence and reasoning have been questioned. Does Linkins read the opinion section of his own newspaper?

Or does he only read articles with his byline?

Alex Leo told her Huffington Post readers that Allen is "a bigot."

Leo says she "cannot in good conscience read the Washington Post ever again ... I won't be missing much, the New York Times is a better paper and the internet is a faster and better way into politics, but this will be my first break with a major newspaper and it turns out they didn't lose me because 'print is dead,' they lost me because they gave a bigot a platform, defended her, tried to make it seem like she was kidding (she's not, by the way and makes that clear in this forum), and then gave her another THREE HOURS on their website to purport her hatred and inanity."

Leo goes on to play a game of semantics with Allen's column, suggesting that the piece would be regarded as "vile and base and shocking" if the assertions were racial instead of sexual.

I'm sorry that so many people were offended by the article and the fact that the Washington Post published it.

But in a campaign in which I have been called "racist" by Obama supporters and "sexist" by Clinton supporters -- all because I, who originally supported John Edwards, simply asked readers for more information about the candidates before making my decision about how to vote in last week's Texas primary -- I thought it was important for people to be able to laugh at themselves.

Maybe I was wrong.

But if I was, maybe a sense of humor has become the most noteworthy casualty in this war.

What It's All About

A friend of mine, whose opinion I value, insisted, as I was trying to decide for which candidate to vote in yesterday's Texas Democratic primary, that it wasn't about misogyny vs. racism.

Yet, lurking beneath the surface, where all those high-minded subjects -- like "hope" and "change" and who is better qualified to answer a crisis call at 3 a.m. -- were (supposedly) getting the attention, is (you guessed it) misogyny vs. racism.

And, I have the feeling that, no matter who wins the race to the Democratic nomination, those issues will influence the general election as well.

No matter how much you try to distance yourself from that with thoughts about foreign policy, health care, the economy, NAFTA and the other things that affect everyday life for everyone, misogyny and racism won't be denied their role in this campaign.

It was inevitable. A country that wants to be seen by the rest of the world as the land of opportunity for everyone hasn't been the place where women or racial minorities were taken seriously in a quest for the highest office in the land. Until now.

One way or another, we're going to have something completely new in the general election campaign. We're either going to have a white woman or a black man at the top of the ticket.

And that means we're going to have to deal with some issues that have been buried in past elections.

We're not used to this in America. Sure, we have a "first" from time to time -- but, up until now, all our presidential nominees have been white and male.

This year, we'll have a presidential nominee whose candidacy speaks to issues we haven't dealt with before -- like shattering a "glass ceiling" or truly living up to the creed that says "all men are created equal."

Once Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have resolved their fight for the Democratic nomination, those will be issues that John McCain will have to deal with as well. He may prefer to talk about winning in Iraq and loving your country -- but his opponent will speak to what the country is really about -- whether it really believes in equality.

And, after months of all this, would it surprise any of us if the majority of America's voters look at the battle now being waged between Clinton and Obama, and turn instead to McCain in a "plague on both your houses" move?

Maureen Dowd recognizes what the issues really are in this campaign. The columnist for the New York Times says, "[T]he Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts. People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?"

As America has learned -- painfully and tentatively -- in other areas, it is necessary to deal with the past before proceeding to the future.

"As it turns out," observes Dowd, "making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?"

I can't answer that question.

But I can say this.

I'm glad the question is out of my hands -- for now.