John Edwards can get a haircut a day for a year on Sarah Palin's RNC clothing budget.
McCain says she needed clothes. So do a lot of people.
Come to think of it, $150,000 could probably buy the entire inventory of a thrift store.
But, the real story here is the dynamic exposed in the GOP ticket. It turns out that Palin received speech coaching prior to her big night in Minneapolis.
Is anyone else whistling songs from My Fair Lady?
The rap on the Palin flap should not be about the $150,000 expenditure; it should be about John McCain playing Henry Higgins to Palin's Eliza Doolittle. It's more than a little unseemly for a self-professed maverick -- the term brims with self-confidence -- to pluck a pretty woman from relative obscurity and immediately give her a makeover so she fits his image of what he needs. It's creepy, too. Whatever else we think of her, Palin doesn't appear to have reached the Governorship of Alaska by being anything other than herself. The only reason for her to change her spots so willingly is naked ambition; the only reason for McCain to force her to is that the real Sarah Palin would have been recognized as unqualified from the outset. The clothes and the diction changes were designed to hide her insubstantiality; long enough, McCain hoped, for the American public to be fooled. The deceit worked through the convention. Had they been able to keep her from the media, the McCain campaign might have succeeded. Even at that, they appear to have successfully fooled many in what's left of the GOP base; that fact alone will not bode well for the 2010 and 2012 elections. If Sarah Palin somehow comes out of this as the Republican to watch, the minority party will see their wilderness time stretch on indefinitely, becaus all Palin offers them is dogwhistles: no policy, no program, no strategy.
With the coming sad denouement, McCain is looking more and more like poor Professor Higgins:
The play ends with everyone leaving to see Doolittle married, except for Higgins, who stays behind shuffling through his pockets and pacing about the room.
It was always hard to feel sorry for Shaw's protagonist; after all, we all knew he deserved exactly what he got.