Contemporary Usage
In May 2002, brokerage firm Charles Schwab Corporation ran a television advertisement pointing out Wall Street brokerage firms' conflicts of interest by showing an unidentified sales manager telling his salesmen, "Let's put some lipstick on this pig!" The ad appeared shortly after New York's Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced that Merrill Lynch stock analysts had recommended stocks that they privately called "dogs." CBS refused to air the ad.
More recently, the phrase has been used in political rhetoric to criticize spin, and to insinuate that a political opponent is attempting to repackage established policies and present them as new. Victoria Clarke, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Donald Rumsfeld, published a book about spin in politics titled Lipstick on a Pig: Winning In the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game. The book argued, using anecdotes from her own career, that spin does not work in an age of transparency, when everyone will find out the truth anyway ("you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig").
In recent years the phrase has become common and often controversial political invective both in the United Kingdom and the United States. The expression has been used by many US politicians, including both the Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain during the United States Presidential Election of 2008, and Vice President Dick Cheney(who called it his "favorite line").
Read more about this topic: Lipstick On A Pig
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