Anyone thinking Maureen Dowd wouldn’t go off on the reports of Sarah Palin’s $150,000 shopping spree was sadly mistaken.
Politico broke the news that the Republican National Committee spent over $150,000 on a "Pretty Woman"-style shopping spree for Palin, including about $75,000 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis and nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and St. Louis.
But the Julia Roberts "hooker with a heart of gold and credit card of platinum" movie isn’t the only Movies With Maureen® we get. She also returns to the My Fair Lady motif she mined back in the "My Fair Veep" column by comparing Palin to Eliza Doolittle to the extend that the campaign hired a speech coach to make sure "the snow in Juneau falls mainly on the moose."
Maureen also makes a rather weird presidential succession hypothesis about Palin's presidential chances.
At the end of the column, Maureen makes a suspicious presidential succession assumption.
The conservative big shots who have not deserted Palin and still think she can be Reagan in a Valentino skirt are furious at those who have mishandled the governor and dimmed her star power. They mourn that she may have to wait now until 2016 to get rid of the phony stench of designer populism.
Makeovers are every woman’s dream. But this makeover has simply pushed back Palin’s dream of being president.
This scenario seems to assume that if the McCain/Palin ticket would win that McCain wouldn’t survive two full terms. Hoping for that sort of tragic upgrade is too much for even a Cinderella-in-go-go-boots to hope for.
By "conservative big shots" I assume Dowd means Bill Kristol who has foisted Palin on the McCain campaign. I would assume that even Kristol-Meth isn't Machiavellian enough to hope that McCain's bad health would vault Palin into the presidency before 2016.
Meanwhile, the whole Palin as a hooker idea had me photoshop up a GOP version of the Pretty Woman poster which can be found here.