{"id":1271,"date":"2008-10-26T18:03:27","date_gmt":"2008-10-26T23:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1271"},"modified":"2008-10-26T18:03:27","modified_gmt":"2008-10-26T23:03:27","slug":"sarah-palins-wardrobe-palin-and-our-readers-respond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2008\/10\/26\/sarah-palins-wardrobe-palin-and-our-readers-respond\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Palin’s Wardrobe – Palin and Our Readers Respond"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/param><\/param><\/object>Sarah Palin’s wardrobe continues to have political traction nearly a week after Politico<\/a> first reported that the McCain camp spent $150,000 to outfit their vice presidential candidate for the campaign trail. The New York Times then reported that Palin’s makeup artist<\/a> was the single highest paid employee in the campaign during a recent two week period (thanks to Allison for the link!). The McCain\/Palin team has done their best to explain and back track on the “clothes kerfuffle.” McCain now claims that a third<\/a> of the $150,000 worth of clothes has been given back, Palin says<\/a> that she isn’t wearing the designer duds any more and has gone back to wearing her clothes from her “favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska” (which just seems pretty disingenuous and transparently silly at this point), and Elizabeth Hasselbeck from The View<\/em>, who is on the trail with her, argued<\/a> “This is deliberately sexist.” <\/p>\n

As I said in my first post, I think it is<\/em> deliberately sexist, but on the McCain camp’s side. They thought it more important to make sure that Palin was perfectly outfitted and make-upped than well-coached on the issues and prepped for interviews and speeches. Perhaps it was to bring in those “Dudes for Palin.”<\/a> As Bob Lamm<\/a> noted after my first post, a huge story was made out of John Edwards’ $400.00 haircut<\/a> during primary season. Like Palin, he ran a campaign based on being one of the people. And like Palin, he experienced a backlash, not to mention a good ribbing from Republicans when his expensive haircut was revealed. Compared to Palin, $400 doesn’t seem so bad now, and it makes me skeptical of the “sexist” arguments.<\/p>\n

Our readers had some great comments on whether the wardrobe matters:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bob Lamm writes in full:<\/p>\n

\nIt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very important NOT to judge any female candidate for any office by ridiculous sexist standards that will never be applied to a male candidate. So normally I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say we should pay no attention to how Sarah Palin dresses or how much her clothing costs. But, even apart from your appropriate comparison to the treatment of Hillary Clinton, two other things come to mind that persuade me that this story is indeed relevant and worth considering:<\/p>\n

1. The media and the GOP made a HUGE issue in the primary campaigns about John Edwards $400 haircut. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some math: $150,000 would buy Sarah Palin almost 400 haircuts at $400 each!<\/p>\n

2. Sarah Palin has made the fact that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hockey mom\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a central selling point of her campaign. How many \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hockey moms\u00e2\u20ac\u009d have $150,000 to spend on their outfits? Many \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hockey moms\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hockey dads\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) are spending every extra penny they have on the rather costly effort to support a kid\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s involvement in amateur hockey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Norris Hall points out how the money didn’t seem well spent from the get go:<\/p>\n

$150,000 could have bought a lot of TV ads or helped pay for bigger staff.
\nDon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they want to win?
\nIt isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t right to ask people to donate $50 and then spend $150,000 on fancy clothers and hairstyles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And anniegirl1138 writes that this is just distracting from much larger issues:<\/p>\n

An example of this would be Palin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s continued insistence that the VP has duties that the Constitution doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t grant the position. Cheney has repeatedly over-stepped his authority wihtout censure and Palin is probably being told to keep repeating that the VP has powers in order to create the perception that the position does have the authority that Cheney usurped. Most people will not bother to read the Constitution of listen to the media refuting her. Cheney did it and she says it, so it must be fact. Lies to Fact is the Republican way. This is more troubling than her wardrobe expenses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Palin’s wardrobe continues to have political traction nearly a week after Politico first reported that the McCain camp spent $150,000 to outfit their vice presidential candidate for the campaign trail. The New York Times then reported that Palin’s makeup artist was the single highest paid employee in the campaign during a recent two week […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[216,129,10745,85],"class_list":["post-1271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-beauty","tag-media","tag-political-campaigns","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}