RNC shells out $150,000 for Sarah Palin's Clothing from Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus
The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.
The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.
The cash expenditures immediately raised questions among campaign finance experts about their legality under the Federal Election Commission's long-standing advisory opinions on using campaign cash to purchase items for personal use.
Politico asked the McCain campaign for comment, explicitly noting the $150,000 in expenses for department store shopping and makeup consultation that were incurred immediately after Palin’s announcement. Pre-September reports do not include similar costs.
Spokeswoman Maria Comella declined to answer specific questions about the expenditures, including whether it was necessary to spend that much and whether it amounted to one early investment in Palin or if shopping for the vice presidential nominee was ongoing.
“The campaign does not comment on strategic decisions regarding how financial resources available to the campaign are spent," she said.
But hours after the story was posted on Politico's website and legal issues were raised, the campaign issued a new statement.
"With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it’s remarkable that we’re spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses," said spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. "It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign."
The business of primping and dressing on the campaign trail has become fraught with political risk in recent years as voters increasingly see an elite Washington out of touch with their values and lifestyles.
In 2000, Democrat Al Gore took heat for changing his clothing hues. And in 2006, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was ribbed for two hair styling sessions that cost about $3,000.
Then, there was Democrat John Edwards’ $400 hair cuts in 2007 and Republican McCain’s $520 black leather Ferragamo shoes this year.
A review of similar records for the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee turned up no similar spending.
But all the spending by other candidates pales in comparison to the GOP outlay for the Alaska governor whose expensive, designer outfits have been the topic of fashion pages and magazines.
What hasn’t been apparent is where the clothes came from – her closet back in Wasilla or from the campaign coffers in Washington.
The answer can be found inside the RNC’s September monthly financial disclosure report under “itemized coordinated expenditures.”
It’s a report that typically records expenses for direct mail, telephone calls and advertising. Those expenses do show up, but the report also has a new category of spending: “campaign accessories.”
September payments were also made to Barney’s New York ($789.72) and Bloomingdale’s New York ($5,102.71).
Macy’s in Minneapolis, another store fortunate enough to be situated in the Twin Cities that hosted last summer’s Republican National Convention, received three separate payments totaling $9,447.71.
The entries also show a few purchases at Pacifier, a top notch baby store, and Steiniauf & Stroller Inc., suggesting $295 was spent to accommodate the littlest Palin to join the campaign trail.
An additional $4,902.45 was spent in early September at Atelier, a high-class shopping destination for men.
McCain in Disarray, Iowa Edition
I think the McCain camp is in full-blown disarray. This reminds me a lot of the end-stages of another high-profile campagin earlier this year, with different "senior advisors" cracking wildly out of turn and deliberately seeking to undermine each other in the news media. Note that these remarks were made on the same day.
Rick Davis (10/20/08):
"We make decisions based on where we think we can play," Davis said, noting that polls he has seen place McCain closer to Obama. "The Iowa numbers look pretty good to me."
CNN (10/20/08):
CNN reports that top officials of Sen. John McCain's campaign are "making tough decisions" as they now see Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa no longer winnable.
Given how delusional Rick Davis appears to be, maybe it's not so surprising that he can't keep his troops in line. Then again, seeing as John McCain himself is so erratic, why should his campaign be any different?
Palin Claims The Vice President Is ‘In Charge Of The U.S. Senate'
Yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) sat for an interview with KUSA, an NBC affiliate in Colorado. In response to a question sent to the network by a third grader at a local elementary school about what the Vice President does, Palin erroneously argued that the Vice President is “in charge of the United States Senate“:
Q: Brandon Garcia wants to know, “What does the Vice President do?”PALIN: That’s something that Piper would ask me! … [T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.
Indeed, while Palin suggests that questions about what the Vice President does is something only her daughter Piper would ask, Palin herself asked this very question on national television in July. Apparently, she still hasn’t learned the correct answer.
Article I of the Constitution establishes an exceptionally limited role for the Vice President — giving the office holder a vote only when the Senate is “equally divided”:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.
Moreover, the U.S. Senate website explains that the modern role of Vice Presidents has been to preside over the Senate “only on ceremonial occasions.” ThinkProgress contacted Senior Assistant Paliamentarian Peter Robinson, who also disputed Palin’s characterization of the Vice President’s role:
In modern practice the Vice President doesn’t really control the Senate. … If anyone has a responsibility to try to govern the Senate, it’s the responsibility of the two leaders.
Fresh Face on Cable, Sharp Rise in Ratings
Rachel Maddow, a woman who does not own a television set, has done something that is virtually unheard of: she has doubled the audience for a cable news channel’s 9 p.m. hour in a matter of days.
More important for her bosses at MSNBC is that “The Rachel Maddow Show,” her left-leaning news and commentary program, has averaged a higher rating among 25- to 54-year-olds than “Larry King Live” on CNN for 13 of the 25 nights she has been host. While the average total audience of her program remains slightly smaller than that of Mr. King’s, Ms. Maddow, 35, has made MSNBC competitive in that time slot for the first time in a decade. The channel at that hour has an average viewership of 1.7 million since she started on Sept. 8, compared with 800,000 before.
Given that advertising dollars — and the reputations of networks — rise and fall on prime-time ratings, Ms. Maddow’s rise has been closely watched by media executives.
“I’m pinching myself,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who used to caution that it “takes two or three years for a show to find its audience.” That was certainly true for Keith Olbermann, whose five-year-old “Countdown” program at 8 p.m. (which leads into Ms. Maddow’s program) now beats CNN in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic segment every evening.
Mr. Griffin said that Ms. Maddow’s advantages included her regular appearances on “Countdown” and her popularity on the Internet, where, he said, “word spread like wildfire” about her new show. Ms. Maddow, a former AIDS activist, was also presumably helped by her four years on the Air America radio network.
Ms. Maddow and every other cable news anchor are beneficiaries of the heightened interest in the presidential campaign. Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor,” the highest-rated hour on cable news, reached an average of four million viewers in September; it had two million during the same period a year ago.
Still, Ms. Maddow’s ascent is unique in its swiftness. Her program immediately drew almost half a million viewers ages 25 to 54 in a slot where a quarter of a million is more common. Even if her ratings decline after the election — and history suggests they are likely to — Mr. Griffin contended that Ms. Maddow’s performance confirmed that cable news was “a three-way race now.”
Fox News did not comment for this article. Ryan Jimenez, a spokesman for “Larry King Live,” said in a statement that the shows couldn’t be more different: “While our competitors have moved to partisan extremes, we continue landing the biggest guests because we embrace the vast middle and have a wider appeal,” he said.
The daily rhythm of television ratings has required an adjustment for Ms. Maddow, whose broadcasting skills were fine-tuned on the radio.
“You don’t get overnights in radio,” she said in an interview, discussing the ratings. “This instant 4 p.m. burst of feedback is hard to get used to.”
But she has adopted the vocabulary quickly, praising Mr. Olbermann for a “931 in the demo” last Tuesday. (That night, Mr. Olbermann’s average of 931,000 viewers 25 to 54 lifted MSNBC to a rare prime-time win over both Fox News and CNN.)
Ms. Maddow acknowledges that much of her success can be attributed to the lead-in from “Countdown,” which continues to be MSNBC’s marquee program. For years Mr. Olbermann, a vocal critic of the Bush administration, had pushed the network to install a thematically similar program in the 9 p.m. hour, and in August MSNBC decided to replace “Verdict With Dan Abrams” with Ms. Maddow. While Mr. Abrams on occasion bested Mr. King in the ratings, Ms. Maddow’s wins are coming at a more frequent rate.
In her first six weeks Ms. Maddow on many nights is retaining more than 90 percent of Mr. Olbermann’s audience, a figure that many television executives would envy.
Encouraging the audience to stay put, the two programs often cover similar subjects most nights: on Friday, for example, Ms. Maddow appeared on “Countdown” to discuss the political maneuverings inherent in the contentions of voter registration fraud, and in her following hour she devoted two segments to the same subject.
While Mr. Olbermann watches Mr. O’Reilly’s show on a monitor embedded in his desk, Ms. Maddow insists that she has never watched either Mr. King’s program or the 9 p.m. program on Fox News, “Hannity & Colmes,” which garners more viewers than either of the other shows.
Partly, she said, that lack of competitive interest is an effort to remain original. “I worry every day about the homogenizing forces at work in my professional life,” she said, adding that it can be difficult to preserve creativity within cable’s production process. It helps, she said, that she does not own a television at home.
Even so, Ms. Maddow said, she has finally committed to getting a set, primarily so that her companion can watch her program. With Ms. Maddow delivering MSNBC a record audience, it might seem that the least the network could do would be to deliver her a television.
Senator Jim Webb criticizes Sarah Palin in Roanoke, Virginia
Appearing in Virginia with Barack Obama, Sen. Jim Webb was characteristically blunt, taking a few shots today at Sarah Palin and defending Barack Obama against attempts to cast him as an outsider, saying voters in more conservative southwest Virginia could trust him, Carrie Budoff Brown reports.
"Do you really think Sarah Palin is the most qualified person in the Republican Party?" Webb asked as he introduced Obama in Roanoke.
The crowd yelled "no" at the mention of her name and booed.
"I don't know how many people here like country music," Webb continued. "I like country music. There was a song about two years ago, 'I know what I was doing, but what was I was thinking?' John McCain is probably singing that song right now."
Webb moved onto the vice presidential debate. "Gov. Palin turned around and said, 'Nice to meet you, can I call you Joe?' I was thinking, Joe, what you really outta do is say, 'Yeah, you can call me whatever you want. In two months, you're gonna be calling me Mr. Vice President.'"
In making the case for Obama, Webb said the Illinois senator has ties to the region — a fact that one Obama aide had not known about.
"There's a lot of comments that have been made about certain ethnic issues in this campaign," Webb said. "I would like to say we know Barack Obama's father was born in Kenya. Barack Obama's mother was born in Kansas by way of Kentucky. We are going to see on Election Day the election of the fourteenth president of the United States whose ancestry, family line goes back to mountains of this area.
"Barack Obama understands you. The first place he visited after he was officially nominated — he came here to southwest Virginia. This will be his seventh trip to southwest Virginia. And you can trust him — I trust him."