Once again, one of the many reasons I'm glad I'm a guy. I open up my closet for work and it's just two sets of clothes: one of solid colored shirts and the other of solid colored pants. So, when I'm not really awake and getting dressed in the morning, the only thing I have to do it make sure I don't pick ones that are the same color. :D

SI

But if it were a straight-up popular vote, everyone would still have a say in the final results, right? One vote is just that, one vote.

I'm assuming that given the electoral college system that you have, you've got horrible voter turnout all over the country.

Lies. Everyone knows that people in Maine and Vermont get power from pine sap.


This is the same Sarah Palin who at the GOP convention (which was before the shopping spree) got so much attention in part because of her appearance? And she needed another $150,000 on top of that to look good?

Look, I understand they needed to get her more clothes for the campaign trail. Unlike guys, who can have a bunch of suits and white shirts and ties (and at least the shirts and ties can be pretty cheap), women on the campaign trail really need different outfits so as not to repeat outfits too much, which is not a concern for men.

However, $150,000? From Saks & Needless Markup? There are thousands of professional women who go to work each day looking good and professional who don't spend that kind of money and/or get very good looking clothes from much less expensive retailers.


That's basically why it matters. It's an image thing. It begins to look hypocritical to be a champion of the common man when you spend more on clothes than the common man makes in a year (or two, or three). Plus, if I was a donor to the RNC (not even a donor to McCain/Palin) would I be 100% happy with this use of my money?


Or Rhode Island, apparently.

Anyone who votes based on petty things like haircuts or suits...needs to have their vote revoked.

No joke...

Heaven forbid things get discussed such as who has the better plan to turn around the economy, or discussion of each candidate's foreign policies or what will be done about health care, etc. Lets discuss instead who spends too much on suits or haircuts, or if such and such candidate once upon a time walked on the same street as someone else.

To put the amount in perspective, that 150,000 is just a little under what the RNC spent on advertising last week in MO and WV combined.

But "needs to" and "has had" are two very different things. Therefore it's an issue the realistic pol has to be aware of and deal with.


If it's toward the effort of winning, I really don't see it as an issue. After all, that's the overriding purpose of the donation presumably (ignoring the whole donate in order to have some advantage in the event of a victory thing).

Well, that's the thing. Is the money better spent on Sarah Palin (who already looked good, or at least could have continued to look good with less of an outlay on clothes from two very expensive retailers), or on media buys?

I, personally, don't have a problem with it. I regularly present/interact with C-level executives, so I know the value of dressing well and looking good on a regular basis. I find the result of the RNC's ham-handed handling of this to be funny and the resulting media backlash predictable. But if anyone wants to claim that this won't have some effect amongst the electorate (ironically the part of the electorate the GOP ticket has been courting strongly for at least the past week), well, good luck with that. :D

Man, the attacks on Palin are reaching a new high. I checked Yahoo, CNN, MSNBC and even MSN last night- all had negative stories on Palin at the top (most on the 150K outfit and how Palin is killing McCain's chances). I just don't understand why so many are so angry at her. Is it really this "a woman being pro life" issue?

It has nothing to do with her being pro life. As mentioned, John Edwards had the same treatment regarding his haircut. It is really a "Media just reports on anything stupid and unfortunately for the most part the american public enjoys reading it" issue

I think it depends on the media outlet. The dumber ones are attacking Palin on the $150,000 because it's easy and will generate a lot of viewers. The smarter ones are attacking Palin because of the theory that all she's done is solidify the base, whilst alienating the parts of the electorate McCain needed to add to win the election.

I'm surprised no one has posted this yet:

http://www.journalism.org/node/13307


It's going to be pretty tough to make a charge when 6 in 10 are negative. Not that McCain has run a wonderful campaign, but I'm beginning to wonder if he was going to be behind the eight-ball no matter what.

The amount of media $150k buys, depending upon the market of course, can be pretty negligible, and at this point the impact is pretty questionable with regard to anything other than turnout so ... a coin flip AFAIC. Palin is the only thing positively energizing the voters that absolutely must turnout for McCain to have any chance at all, so yeah, I can see investing it in her rather than him as being a reasonable decision.

The other thing we aren't privvy to is what research may have been behind the decision. I have to suspect that there was something coming back indicating an issue and this was an attempt to address the situation (remember, once upon a time there was analysis of the impact of Hillary's hairstyle on voters) Even as little as I think of a lot of the strategy I've seen, I have a tough time picturing this being entirely the result of someone saying "hey, why don't we take Sara shopping?". That just doesn't ring quite true to me. And if it was just totally random then let's face it, the people spending the money wouldn't likely to be smart enough to do anything worthwhile with it anyway.

They seceded

Fair enough.

Well Palin is killing McCain's chances. Her selection has become McCain's number one negative among those polled and as Palin's favorability rating has plummeted the percentage of people who view McCain's age as a negative has risen.

People aren't angry at her as much as they don't feel she'd make a capable president.

As for the clothes thing, yeah that's been overblown but some people find it amusing.

My guess is that the map was done prior to the certification process being completed.

New England is different from most of the rest of the US, in that election results are tabulated and certified at the town level, not the county level. I suppose that the map maker wanted to use certified results to create the map, and there were probably some straggler towns in those states that certified late--which would make county calculations difficult (if you wanted to use apple-to-apples certified data)...

I think a decent amount of it is hypocrisy as well (as Jon Stewart alluded to last night). She (and her campaign) are going through great lengths to portray her as an average woman, an outsider who doesn't play by the rules of the "Washington elite", and will bring the issues the voters really care about (family values, etc). Then they go out and spend more in 6 weeks than the average family makes in 3 years to make her look good. I believe it's a non-story and they are donating everything to charity once the election is over (so they say), so really it's not a big deal. But it is a stark contrast to the message they are trying to send and that's why it gets airtime.

GO PHILS!

No, it's a person being unqualified, holier than thou, and hypocritical. From the media's standpoint, it's someone that's unprepared and, as a result, inaccessible to media. It took 55 days before she was interviewed on NBC Nightly News (per Brian Williams). And, the Republicans are so afraid of what'd she say, John McCain had to be there. She has a hard time giving the same answer twice, and can't stay on message. I think the media view it as an added bonus that even a lot of conservatives view her as the most unqualified person to be nominated for veep.

Good point on the outfit, but it's more about the stories on her hurting the ticket. I watched NBC news while at a hotel and they referenced this poll:

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/do...oll_102108.pdf

Here's the exact quote from the newscast:

Now, if you look at the PDF poll above and the history of the poll, you find that 40% had her "qualified" in September 19-22, 41% in October 4-5 and back to 40% in the new poll. This is somehow a "dangerous" trend. Quite honestly, given the mugging she's received over the past month, it's almost shocking that the qualified number hasn't changed.

Maybe she just spent some of the savings from the Bridge to Nowhere.

Maybe she should be more concerned about repeating speeches than repeating outfits.

But seriously, this is a male-dominated board, and the votes the campaign wants her to get are women -- I'm guessing they notice this stuff more than we do.

If there was one group of people who could be blamed for nearly all of the country's ills today, it would definitely be the liberal media! Why must they be so mean to the Palin drones?

I think they're referring to how the percent that had her "unqualified" went from 50% to 55%.

I just saw this, and while I don't think it is relevant to Palin's ability to run the country, it is absurd. And I think making a separate thread would be even worse than posting it here and rolling my eyes (that is, make it seem more newsworthy than it is).

Palin says she considers herself intellectual - washingtonpost.com

She shouldn't have said that, intellectuals don't poll well with the Republican base. The "voracious reader" quote is especially damaging because she didn't mention the Bible afterwards.

That is a remarkable statistic, especially given the MSM's love affair with John McCain that lasted for years and years, basically ending after the GOP convention.

Of course, when your campaign admits publicly that it can't win on the issues, runs a 100% negative smear campaign, and picks the most unqualified running-mate in political history, it's tough to find something positive to say.

;)

Excellent analysis.

I also believe the MSM has picked up, not on the whole shopping spree per-se, but how spending that amount of money appears in complete contradiction to so many things McCain-Palin has campaigned on.

Joe Six Pack, Joe The Plumber, Small Town Values, Obama is an Elitist - all of those kind of sound hypocritical when you drop 150 large on clothes.

But Palin looks good. MILFy, even.

Knowing the cost of a typical market research study, someone saying "hey, why don't we take Sara shopping?" in the first place would have been cheaper. :)

But isn't anyone who actually believes for more than a few seconds that a national level politician lives in a world that remotely resembles the majority of the voters pretty much a damned fool from the get go?

It seems pretty likely to me that the people who claim to be the most offended by the spending on the clothes are also among the most likely to be influenced by self-same clothes ... further proof perhaps that we're so FUBAR at this point that it may not matter much who wins what this year.

In the words of D-Von Dudley "Oh my brutha ... TESTIFY !".

Do you think Obama shops at the Men's Warehouse? I'd be shocked if his wardrobe expenses aren't in the same ballpark.

Murtha much?

Since I have no clue whether you're kidding, Rep. Murtha was widely criticized in recent days for saying that Western Pennsylvania has a lot of rednecks. I was merely playing off that. I honestly have no idea whether there are rednecks in Pennsylvania.

I feel like I'm a politician and should publicly apologize for Mr. Murtha's comments.

I would be very surprised. Even if he bought $5,000 suits he would need to be 30 of them. Let's say he buys $1,000 shirts to go with them, and he has, I don't know, 30 shirts, then that's 30 shirts (one for each day of the month) and 24 suits. Unless he is buying $30,000 suits, that still seems very excessive for a man's wardrobe.

Exactly. An intelligent media would note that big players like Obama and McCain are spending 2,000-5,000 per suit on their wardrobe (which is similarly paid for by the party) and that their suit/shirt/shoes costs easily exceed 100K when all is said and done. They are not buying $200 suits on sale at Men's Wearhouse.

non-dola: I assume McCain, Obama and Biden spend a similar amount of money compared to one another on clothing for the campaign trail.

With all due respect, you're a naive fool. I have a friend that is a lobbyist for Northrop Grumman in DC and knows how the political machine works. The amount of money spent on clothes by some of these big players is outrageous (both male and female). I'm surprised that Pelosi or Clinton's wardrobe hasn't been similarly catalogued (by surprised, I mean not surprised at all).

His suits cost WAY more than $5k.

I don't care either way, except when someone starts criticizing how much one of the other candidates spends and calls it "hypocritcal".

Some people who have delved deeper into the RNC's accounting are finding, apparently, that part of the $150,000 also went to accessories, like $1,000 handbags, some of which have also been used by Palin's daughters.

So there's how you get to $150,000, anyway.

In comparison, Gore in 2000 got suits donated to him, and was able to list them as contributions at material/labor cost($500 or less a suit) because designers get free advertising.

You really think with Palin's image being such a big part of public consciousness right now, that she couldn't find some designers to donate if they looked for it? I find that hard to believe.

The RNC took the quickest and easiest way out, throwing money at the problem. Not what you would expect from Conservatives. Is it a big deal? Of course not. Is it another minor screwup when the campaign needs to be a near playing perfect game right now? You bet.

It isn't catalogued because it wasn't financed with donations. The reason this came to light is that it was disclosed on campaign expenditure forms. It isn't a media conspiracy.

The news media apparently.

And several posters in this thread.

Seriously crazy polls today:

Quinnipiac:
Florida: Obama 49, McCain 44
Ohio: Obama 52, McCain 38
Pennsylvania: Obama 53, McCain 40



Big Ten:
Illinois: Obama 61, McCain 32
Indiana: Obama 51, McCain 41
Iowa: Obama 52, McCain 39
Ohio: Obama 53, McCain 41
Michigan: Obama 58, McCain 36
Minnesota: Obama 57, McCain 38
Pennsylvania: Obama 52, McCain 41
Wisconsin: Obama 53, McCain 40



CNN/TIME:
Nevada: Obama 51, McCain 46
North Carolina: Obama 51, McCain 47
Ohio: Obama 50, McCain 46
Virginia: Obama 54, McCain 44

It's a crock of filth is what it is. The intent of digging for this information was solely to paint Sarah Palin as being a Paris Hilton type who will spend dollars at the drop of a hat. At the same time, no one went about mentioning just how much some of the other politicians spent on the race. Why? Because they only wanted to report the portion of the story that fit their billing rather than doing proper reporting and noting that Obama, Biden, and McCain all have wardrobes that dwarf that $150K value. It's just more class warfare.

Kudos to liberal supporters for finding a way to mask negative and sexist campaigning in the cloak of 'searching for the best interest of the Republican donors and taxpayers'.

BS. Michelle Obama got negative press and attention from conservatives over a lobster and cavier dinner at a hotel. The problem? She never even stayed at that hotel! So don't even bring that weak crap in here about woe-is the scruitny against Palin spending money.

I saw the Obamas at Arby's yesterday.

Maybe when (best selling author) Obama was bragging that he only had 1 house v. McCain's 5

I bet they got the 5 dollar subs instead of ordering 99 cent value sandwiches. Fuckin elitists.