Even if the worst is true about Obama’s motives in making the remark, I agree with Roger Kimball that McCain’s folks should let it go:
Was this a “mega gaffe“? Maybe it will turn out to be, but I for one hope that the McCain camp gives it a rest. Of course it was a reference to Sarah Palin’s line about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was that the hockey mom wore lipstick; and of course Obama intended a some of that porcine unpleasantness to rub off on S. Palin, Governor of Alaska. He was doubtless also, I am reliably informed, alluding to the colloquial phrase about putting lipstick on a pig, i.e., “slang for when someone tries to dress something up, but is still that something.”
By dropping it, McCain-Palin take the high road.
And as Yuval Levin points out, between Obama’s gaffe and Biden’s ugly reference to Palin’s Down syndrome child and stem cell research, these two are on the way to a meltdown.