Michael Graham at National Review
| The Obama camp has been working the "lipstick meme" for days. |
Yesterday afternoon I spent two hours in the parking lot of a restaurant in the Boston suburbs collecting lipsticks from angry voters who want to send a message to Sen. Obama. I was expecting maybe 50 people to stop by. Instead, about 200 angry, horn-honking, fired up listeners — mostly women — helped me fill an entire bulk mail bin with lipsticks.
They aren't nit-picking over exactly what was on Sen. Obama's mind when he made the crack about lipstick.
They heard it, and they got the message.
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Usually when a talk radio host does a station event, the attendees are overwhelmingly male, as is our listenership. But 75% or more of the folks who came by yesterday were women. And they aren't nit-picking over exactly what was on Sen. Obama's mind when he made the crack about lipstick. They heard it, and they got the message.
One woman, who identified herself as a Hillary supporter, drove in from Rhode Island. Another — a mother in her late 40s — drove 42 miles each way to bring me one lipstick.
I know there are conservatives who think this controversy is a campaign fiction being cleverly exploited by the McCain campaign. But as I wrote in the Boston Herald today, I think they're wrong. The Obama campaign has been working the "lipstick" meme for days. Sen. Obama should have left it to his surrogates, but instead gave into a moment of unbecoming snarkiness towards Gov. Palin.
The crowd knew it, and the women I'm hearing from — I've gotten several hundred emails from them in 24 hours — heard it, too. |