Well, the roar of the crowd has faded away, the stadium lights are out, the Styrofoam Greek columns have been hauled back to the studio lot, Andrea Mitchell has been released from her balloon prison....and silly season has officially returned.

The latest kerfuffle is over lipstick.

Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama felt the need to visit the rhetorical Clinique counter at events this week. Biden said of the McCain campaign: "There's no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick." At a seperate event, Obama noted: "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig."

Now the McCain-Palin camp is feigning outrage, and the Obama-Biden camp is swearing up and down that their candidates were not riffing on Sarah Palin's line about hockey moms and pit bulls.

On the surface, the whole thing is just eye-rollingly stupid. Biden and Obama were throwing out uncreative, unproductive little scraps of red meat for their audiences. Now McCain and Palin can take it and turn it into chum for their own audiences. Campaigning 101.

But there is a real danger here, and it's clear that the Democrats are only beginning to figure out that they have stepped into a big old moose trap.

You do have to feel somewhat sorry for Obama and Biden. They were most likely expecting to face off against something like a McCain-Pawlenty ticket -- the electoral equivalent of watching white paint dry on an already-white wall.

Instead, they got Lipstick.

In a normal election cycle, this wouldn't have been a insurmountable problem. Obama would have just come out of a primary season where his opponents were the same six or seven white guys that always seem to think that this, finally, is their year.

Instead, he spent months defeating a certain junior senator from New York.

I don't believe for a moment that Barack Obama or the Democratic Party leadership that favored him over Hillary Clinton set out to run a primary campaign based on misogyny. To their credit, they did try to stay away from overt displays of sexsim. But it quickly became clear that sexism is everywhere in our society, and it eventually oozed into every aspect of the discussion.

So, while they didn't directly participate it in, they certainly benefitted from it -- and consequently did very little to stop it or speak against it.

The net result was a breathtaking sense of indifference to pro-Clinton female voters within the Democratic Party. Women who resisted coming fully into the Obama camp -- even when this resistance was based not just on their preference for Senator Clinton as a person, but on concerns about Obama's seeming shift to the center on FISA, faith-based inititives, Iraq, and several other key issues -- were dismissed as dead-enders, women too "emotional" to understand the real importance of winning this election.

There wasn't any substantive discussion about the underlaying issues--  just the presumtion that once the ladies calmed down....maybe had a couple of Cosmopolitans and bought a new pair of shoes or a nice dress or something.... they'd come home. After all, where else do they have to go?

Republicans were clearly taking notes through all of this mess. Their choice of Sarah Palin wasn't a sop to disaffected Hillary voters. Governor Palin is there for the millions of conservative, pro-life, and evangelical women that John McCain couldn't hope to win on his own -- women who, in all likelihood, would have stayed home on Election Day.

Now, the same Democratic Party that scheduled Senator Bob Casey -- one of their most vocal pro-life members -- to speak on the night supposedly set aside to celebrate not just Hillary Clinton's historic accomplishment, but the participation of all women within the party, and the same Democratic candidate that didn't even bother to pretend to consider Clinton for the vice presidency, expects her and her supporters to swoop in and pull their huevos out of the fire, now that this mean girl is picking on them.

And they probably will. For committed Democratic women, there really isn't much choice but to stay with the party. But it may be too late.

To beat Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama had to make her life and her experience seem less significant than his own much-slimmer resume. To do that, he had to strike directly at the heart of the modern American womanhood: no matter how hard we work, no matter what we accomplish, it's never enough, and it's not that important.

The tactic worked in the moment. It might not work this time.

Sarah Palin is woefully inexperienced and ideologically somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun. But like Hillary Clinton, she is also a symbol of something larger than her own life or beliefs.

Attacks on her, however justifiable or accurate, are going to be seen as attacks on womanhood itself. All the Republicans have to do is cast everything the Democrats say as sexist, and they will hold their base. Every time they can bait someone -- the notably gaffe-prone Biden, for example -- to say something nakedly biased, they'll pick up votes.

So there you have it: In their zeal to defeat Clinton, pro-Obama Democrats just spent a year tailoring a Teflon pantsuit for Palin.   

Everyone thought that Election '08 was going to be a referendum on eight years of Republican rule, or on four centuries of racism in American. It's not.

Exactly eighty-eight ears after winning the right to vote, the fears of the anti-suffragists are going to be realized....because it's looking increasinly like women will be the deciding factor in this election. Millions of those women are not ideologically committed to either party, and millions of others feel dissed by the Democrats. Almost three weeks after Governor Palin entered the race, the Obama campaign has yet to find an effective way to counter her momentum. They only have seven weeks left to undo a hell of a lot of self-inflicted damage.  

And, sorry guys, but lipstick quips just aren't going to do it.