So, the Great Saks Fifth Avenue Slaughter of 2008 has been my come to Jesus moment with Sarah Palin. Yeah, I’ve gone all the way around back to loving her again. It’s like she’s the Washington Redskins, nobody’s allowed to say anything bad about her except me, and then it’s only because I want her to do well. Place me aboard Marc Ambinder’s 2012 Sarah Palin game plan. Nevertheless, the Ballad of the Epic Pencil Skirt has dominated the news cycle while Obama’s in Hawaii.

Via Captain Ed, Campbell Brown identifies and spits on the double standard Althouse tackled last night:

Politico reported this morning that stylists defended the $150,000 — adding that Michelle Obama’s campaign outfits routinely cost $2000. E.M. Zanotti, the American Princess, if you will, echoes Brown’s comments, but has something to add about that double standard (as well as a quality detailing of what labels the RNC probably went with, which I agree with, though I don’t think I’ve seen Palin in St. John):

“We’re brutal. If Sarah Palin walked out of her motorcade dressed in an ill-fitting shantung pant-suit with a too-short jacket and a pair of Payless heels, we’d have eaten her alive. And I’m nice to her, and here I am admitting to you, my loyal audience of five, that I, personally, would have taken her, brutally, to task for her choice of campaign finery. And I’m not even close to Perez Hilton. [...]

“Now, I don’t know if [...] whether the $150K is necessary, but you see, that’s the RNC’s problem. Not Sarah’s. We’ve long said that the RNC is out of touch with the Republican base and if you’ve suddenly discovered that, oh American media and great legions of liberal Obamatrons, well then you’ve just stumbled upon something we’ve known for years. [...It's] representative of a fault we’ve been conditioned to ignore for a long time, assuming that the only choices we had in candidates were people who were hand-plucked from the Washington cocktail circuit or the local political machine [...] Sarah Palin represents, to so many, the idea that the Everyman Candidate who goes to Washington to deliver remarkable, Jimmy Stewart speeches at the end of 18-hour filibusters with the intent of changing the way that business is done in the city that represents everything we hate about government, is not lost in the archives of an out-of-business movie studio. If the RNC wants to screw that up by painting her with Guerlain and stuffing her into the $5K suits we all complain about, they’re creating their own monster. Sarah is the woman who stops at Wal-Mart for diapers. Its the RNC that hires $10K makeup artists.”

Mark Mays said something similar in the comments on my post last night; I still would argue the cost incurred here for the RNC, not beloved anyway, is less than the one that would have been incurred for Sarah Palin, The Candidate if Palin had rolled out in clothing not properly tailored and with her roots showing. That would have been painful; admittedly, possibly a rallying cry for people around the country taking umbrage at Palin’s beatdown from the MSM, but as I think her personal attractiveness is an asset for her (in the same way that Reagan’s pomade and tuxedos had appeal), to risk the whole “Redneck Woman…who looks like a real Redneck” narrative would have played poorly. Again, a no win situation for her.

I don’t know how effectively that addresses the RNC’s NYC-DC Corridor Cocktail Party Mindset. But the manner they’ve been dressing Palin, with the patent leather pumps and knee-high boots, doesn’t quite conjure up “Inside the Beltway.” The $150,000 price tag can be attributed to something Zanotti mentioned: they were looking for high quality. I’d add: they were looking for it quickly. When you’re looking for something quickly, you go where you know you can find it (…dirty!). NY Mag, of course, rounds up everybody who could have possibly ripped on Palin yesterday, so if you’re so inclined there’s a reading list. Fortunately, they made up for it and the David Brooks Culture War by figuring out that it doesn’t take much to blow $150k for 67 days of campaigning.

But again, I don’t know that I can make an argument for the culture of expensive clothing on candidates. However, the reality of the campaign world, the Washingtonian political realm with Laura Bush and Nancy Pelosi alike in Oscar de la Renta, and the international landscape with Carla Bruni traipsing around with Sarkozy is that looking polished means something, and acquainting Sarah Palin with that world required a significant sum of money, that was insignificant to the relative rate of return for the RNC.

Katherine Miller is a junior at Vanderbilt University. She can be reached at kat.m.miller@vanderbilt.edu