The morning after Frau Palin's speech at the RNC, that very line popped into my head. As some of my former colleagues know, this phrase is near and dear to my heart. We recited it every time we walked out the door on a new business pitch. Someone even did some photoshop work and added lipstick to a photo of pig and hung it near the desk of our new business guy.
But knowing that I'm cynical, jaded and short-tempered (no, I'm not secretly John McCain), I didn't think it would be a good phrase to trot out in reference to our political opponents. Too easily turned around by the right, I nodded to myself.
So what does the "composed one" do? He delivers the line himself. Doh!
Yes, the proper analogy is that Sarah Palin is the lipstick on the pig that is the conservative movement. But can we find a metaphor that's not shaped like a boomerang?
As John Heilemann points out in his excellent New York magazine article, the Democrats continue to play campaign checkers while the Republicans play chess.
As a child, I would patiently wait for my dad to get home so we could drink hot tea and play a few games of chess. Before you declare my father an elitist, please know that he worked as a press operator for Western Printing, publishers of the beloved Little Golden Books. He never made more than $10,000 a year, but raised four children on that salary. Hard to fathom, ain't it? But quietly, in those chess matches everyday, he taught me the value of thinking ahead. Of course, my Sicilian mother immediately canceled that out with her gift of hot-tempered blood, but more on that at another time.
In facing the new McCain-Palin reality, our campaign needs to react quickly and think ahead. The two are not mutually exclusive, as any good chess player will tell you.
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