CosmoVeep

So there's been some stink about Palin's recent shopping excursion, where she reportedly spent a cool $150,000.00 on new clothes and accessories, including almost $50,000.00 at NEW YORK Saks 5th Avenue, and at least 5gs on new duds for the First Dude. Mostly, the spree is critiqued because the Republican campaign has been so gung-hoe Joe Six Pack, anti pork barrel spending, anti New York elite, never mind the fact that Palin mostly purchased non-American brands, including those ugly Japanese glasses.

Everyone has had their say, from politicos to fashion experts, but I think Melinda Henneberger, a blogger for Slate.com's XX factor, put it best in an interview with NPR on Thursday:

I don't blame her for the clothes. If someone gave me a credit card and pointed me towards Neiman Marcus there is a 0% chance I'd come back and tell you I found some very durable things at JC Penny. But I do blame her for dividing us into elites and non-elites, and real America and fake America. Now we knew she was elite before we saw the clothing bill. She hired a Washington lobbyist for her town of 5000. Who does that? [to quote McCain]. And she has access to $1.5 million herself, which doesn't put her in Cindy McCain territory [estimated at around $100 million, conservatively, no pun intended] but it doesn't make her Josephine Six-Pack either.

This is just one example of the hypocrisies that have tarnished the GOP in recent years. This is not my history lesson blog, so I won't explain exactly how this happened, but around two generations ago the Democrats lost about a third of their base, mostly in the South, to the Republican Party, when they adopted the platform of the civil rights movement, and then again, around a generation later, when the Christian Right and the GOP merged and we elected a Born Again. What no Republican President in recent years seems to have taken into much consideration is that the majority of these voters are working-class blue collar types. And what attracted them to the Democrats in the first place was the stark difference in the economic policies between the two parties, the one constant that has more or less endured since FDR (up until a Republican Executive oversaw the greatest government intervention in the financial market, again, since FDR).

So it's possible, upon hearing how much money Palin's team (Cindy McCain?) spent on her wardrobe, she will lose a few more of those disaffected voters who can't quite remember how they got to where they are. While its not a large number, and you probably won't see it affecting the polls, its just one more example of why its even possible that there are still a few SWING VOTERS out there, who are having a hard time abandoning the party they were raised on, but just can't reconcile voting for someone who is not saying anything they need to hear.