“You can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to a previous Sarah Palin joke. “It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still going to stink after eight years.”

If I called my competitor a pig or fish, would my customer/prospect think that it was witty or would they take it as the insult it so obviously was meant to mean?

We must remember you never get looked down upon for taking the high road. Some comments are hard to live down years later…remember Jesse Jackson and his “Htmietown” slur?

An article in the Washington Post on Feb. 13, 1984, had Rick Atkinson reporting Jesse Jackson as saying, “the most attempts to disrupt this campaign have come from Jewish people.” At the end of the article Atkinson stated that “In private conversations with reporters, Jackson referred to Jews as ‘Hymie’ and to New York as ‘Hymietown.’ ‘I’m not familiar with that,’ Jackson said. ‘That’s not accurate.’ ”

That was twenty four years ago! Have we not learned anything?

See the pic on Flickr