Obama: 'You can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig'

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and running mate Joe Biden continued their tough attacks on the McCain-Palin ticket on Tuesday, but the McCain camp shot back with complaints that the Democrats were somehow offensive to Sarah Palin.

In his speech on Tuesday, Obama ridiculed Sen. John McCain's new argument for change, by pointing out that McCain and President Bush see eye-to-eye on most major issues. "John McCain says he's about change, too," said Obama. "So I guess his whole angle is, "Watch out, George Bush, except for economic policy, health-care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics. We're really gonna shake things up in Washington."

Obama said, "That's not change. That's just calling some -- the same thing, something different. But you know, you can -- you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig." The Illinois senator continued: "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink...We've had enough of the same old thing."

But it was the "lipstick" remark that drew fire from McCain's campaign. The audience at Obama's speech may have taken the lipstick line as a reference to Gov. Palin, according to Politico.com. In her GOP convention speech, Palin said the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is "lipstick."

The McCain campaign then accused Obama of calling Palin a pig, "which he didn't," says Politico. "The Obama campaign notes that 'lipstick on a pig' is a fairly common idiom Obama often uses, as in a recent Washington Post interview. McCain has also used the phrase," the Politico article points out. But the right-leaning New York Post ran a tabloid cover headline accusing Obama of walking a "swine line" and the New York Daily News called it "Lipstick Bungle."

But a year ago, Obama used the same "lipstick" line in a reference to George Bush. "George Bush has given a mission to General Petraeus, and he has done his best to try to figure out how to put lipstick on a pig," Obama said then.

An Obama campaign aide, Anita Dunn, criticized McCain for trying to make this into a sexism issue. "Enough is enough," she said. "The McCain campaign's attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy - the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan just last year. This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run."

Dunn was referring to a remark Sen. McCain himself made last year about Sen. Hillary Clinton and her new health care plan, when McCain said, "I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

John McCain surely knows the "lipstick" comment is a common phrase. H's former press secretary, Torie Clarke, wrote a book called Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign also found offense at a statement made by Sen. Joe Biden this week in Missouri. "I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect," Biden said.

"Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?" The McCain campaign immediately jumped on the comment, accusing Biden of mocking Gov. Palin because she has a child with Down Syndrome. The responses by McCain's campaign seem to be part of a strategy to keep the Democrats on defense.

ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper seemed to dismiss the "lipstick" controversy in his blog entry today. Tapper noted that the first conference call of the McCain-Palin campaign's  is "Truth Squad" addressed Obama's remark. "And interestingly, the Truth Squad call was full of half-truths and statements that weren't true at all," writes Tapper.

Tapper notes that former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift accused Obama of calling Palin a pig. "[T]he formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn't have happened too soon, as we saw when Sen. Obama in Lebanon, Va., this evening uttered what I can only deem to be disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee Gov. Palin to a pig," Swift said. "Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology," she said.

When told that McCain himself had used the phrase, Swift was willing to let the Republican off the hook, assuming he did not mean it literally. But Tapper's column calls for consistency in how the issue is approached. "It seems to me we should have one rule. If Obama was calling Palin a pig, then McCain was calling Hillary Clinton one. If McCain wasn't, then Obama wasn't," Tapper writes.

See an excerpt from Obama's remarks in the video below.