As they addressed a chanting outdoor rally of thousands in northern Virginia today, John McCain and his running mate uttered nary a word about lipstick, hockey -- or even pigs.

They didn't have to. For this day, at least, Democratic candidate Barack Obama's choice of colloquial jibes at the Republican McCain has become a noisy subplot of the presidential campaign.

The context, of course, is the aside that brought down the house during Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's speech a week ago at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull, she joked to laughter and cheers, is "lipstick.''

Tuesday night in rural southwestern Virginia, Obama drew laughter and applause when he rolled out an old saying about lipstick as part of his continuing effort to warn that McCain would continue the Bush administration's policies. "You can put lipstick on a pig,'' Obama said, according to the Associated Press. "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."

Within hours, the lipstick battle was joined, via e-mail, blog and You Tube.

Former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Jane Swift said in an e-mail from the McCain campaign that Obama's comments were "disgraceful'' and suggested that the Democrat had compared the Republican vice presidential candidate to a pig -- a comparison not to be found in Obama's words.

Today at another stop in Virginia, Obama accused the McCain camp of attempting to distract attention from the real issues of the presidential campaign by misinterpreting an innocent comment on his part.

This morning in Fairfax, Va., not far from Washington, D.C., McCain and Palin were greeted by what campaign officials described as their biggest crowd of the season.

Sprinkled in the sea of blue-and-white "McCain-Palin'' posters was a fresh crop of campaign placards that carried not words but a picture: A big pair of lips glossed with pink lipstick.

The only mention of the lipstick-and-pigs affair from the open-air stage was by Lynette Long, who described herself as a Democrat who had supported Sen. Hillary Clinton for her party's nomination. "Mr. Obama, calling girls names is something you do in fifth grade,'' Long said. ``And I don't want a fifth grader running my country.''