It is a well-known saying. If you say “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” you aren’t calling someone a pig either. It is a common expression.
Barry is still a bush league idiot, though.
I respect your attempt at justifying his quote as some kind of flippant joke but the fact remains that Sarah Palin introduced the saying to the popular venacular and thus kind of owns it. That is, any reference by Obama's team for the rest of the campaign to the joke will be understood by 99% of the people that heard Sarah say it as a response to Sarah. When you watch the clip you can see that Obama, as has become the pattern, is rambling and searching for some rhetoric, then pauses, seizes on the idea, and then delivers the line. He then tacks on the fish reference and thinks nothing of it although I bet you just moments later he realized what a monumental mistake he had made.
I am coming to believe in the possibility that Sarah Palin threw in that ad libbed line not only because it would probably be the one quote everyone remembers (many of us would have a list to whittle down) but because eventually Obama or Biden would try some kind of slingshot retort using the same joke and it would backfire. Well it slingshot alright and he is toast in so many ways.
The Obama team may have planned this for some later point and would have worded it in an actual clever way but Obama clearly just winged it with the possible thought that any publicity is good publicity. What an imbecile.
I saw the clip on Fox (unlike the youTube version) and it clearly shows he audience reaction - NOT ONE DOUBT in my mind that he was dissing Sarah! watch the Fox version.....it is bad.