The Boar War

I know Tully has already posted on what Drudge dubbed the "Boar War," but I wanted to add my tuppenyworth since the story is still lingering.

The five issues that strike me are these.

(1) I give Obama a pass when he's trying to extemporize, but the line doesn't seem to be impromptu.

(2) Internal context matters. It's important to look at the lines before and after the "lipstick" line; here's the famous video, but it does Obama (and us) a disservice: it cuts off too soon. It clips the quote. After talking about how McCain claims to be for change but in fact isn't, Obama offers the lipstick on a pig line, and immediately thereafter offers a metaphor about how an old fish wrapped in change isn't going to fool anyone. I agree with Althouse that the two statements should be read together and their meaning taken jointly, but I disagree with her reading. Taken apart, either statement could be an offhand metaphor, but taken together, and on the heals of the preceding comments Obama offered, they do look like a slam against Palin (the lipstick) and McCain (the old fish dressed up in change).

(3) External context matters, too. I think that the context of Palin having given a widely-watched speech where lipstick was a prominent and widely-noted punchline makes it tough for Obama to claim that a pre-written line that could be taken as a slam against Palin was mere happenstance.

(4) Yes, the figure of speech "lipstick on a pig" is very common. No one suggests otherwise. It's not the use of the phrase that's problematic (the reaction of the media and the left to Palin's nomination has proven that red herring is the least-endangered species on the planet); the prolem is the use of a common phrase as a play on words with intent to insult Palin by reference. That is why it's a red herring to point out that McCain used the same figure of speech to describe Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan. McCain's usage of the term plainly referred to Clinton's healthcare plan - not to Hillary herself. If McCain had used the term in a way that was strongly suggestive that the pig in question was Clinton rather than her healthcare plan (a fortiori if Clinton had a week earlier given a speech watched by forty million people that used her wearing lipstick as a punchline), Clinton would have had a legitimate greivance.

And (5) as others have mentioned, this event is on video, which means that we can see and hear how the crowd reacted. To go by their reaction, in my judgment, his audience clearly understood it to be a slam on his opponents. They react strongly; if the phrase is simply a well-worn cliche, why would it elicit the reaction it did? That shouldn't count for nothing; to be sure, people sometimes choose words that say more than the speaker intended, but ordinarily, people use words they think will convey their intended meaning. To the extent that the members of the audience are reasonable people (which isn't very far, I suppose, given that they support Obama) versed in the same general and specialized interpretative community as the speaker (english-speaking liberals), the understanding they inferred from that line having heard everything else said hitherto can be thought evidence of meaning.

You add all this up and it could just be an innocuous gaffe, but it smells fishy.

Added: terrific comment by Maxtrue.