Sarah Palin’s "lipstick" joke is being used against her — purposefully or not — and John McCain’s campaign isn’t happy about it.

"What’s the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?" the Alaskan governor said in her speech at the Republican convention last week. "Lipstick."

During a campaign stop in Virginia Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama — in arguing that John McCain is more of the same of George Bush — said: "You can put lipstick on a pig … 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."

McCain’s campaign called the comments "offensive and disgraceful" and said Obama owes Palin an apology. His campaign even held a conference call with former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, a McCain supporter. 

Click here to listen to the conference call. 

"I think what’s most disappointing and the reason why we need to continually combat this stream of insults is that this is just the latest in the series of comments that many folks like me will find offensive, whether it is Sen. Biden’s comments about Gov. Palin being ‘good-looking,’ their strategist David Axelrod commenting that she obviously knows how to take orders or do what she’s told; the just disgraceful comment by their spokesman that compared her to a ‘Nazi sympathizer’; or the line that I, the mother of three children, find particularly offensive, questioning by one of his finance committee, trying to say that her children, one who has Down syndrome, she’s incapable of doing the job of being the vice president of the United States," Swift said.

"This is just the same old low-road, flinging accusations. And as I said, there are a number of us women across the Republican party, but I also think I’m joined by Independents and Democrats who aren’t going to let our discourse fall to this level. And I think the best way to get things back on the right track would be for Sen. Obama to issue an apology to Gov. Palin."

The Obama camp, which said Obama wasn’t referring to Palin at all, is also firing off verbal responses and e-mails in their defense.

"That expression is older than my grandfather’s grandfather, and it means that you can dress something up but it doesn’t change what it is,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki told ABC News. "He was talking pretty clearly about the fact that you can’t just call yourself change when you’ve voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time."

Democrats point to a news article last fall that said McCain criticized Democrats for offering what he called costly universal health-care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s plan, he said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the failed plan she offered as First Lady in the 1990s. "I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig," he said of her proposal.

They also point out that former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee even said to give Obama a break on the lipstick comment.

"It’s an old expression, and I’m going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one," Huckabee told FOX News. "I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin; he didn’t reference her. If you take the two soundbites together, it may sound like it. But I’ve been a guy at the podium many times, and you say something that’s maybe a part of an old joke and then somebody ties it in. So, I’m going to have to cut him slack."