Sarah Palin: Pretty Woman, or Reality Surpasses Parody

After hearing the news about the $150,000 spent by Sarah Palin on clothes and make up I wrote a parody about this as if she had appeared on the TLC show What Not to Wear. Considering how McCain had earlier attacked Obama as a celebrity, I thought using such a comparison to a make over on a television show was a good way to satirize them. it turns out I didn’t go far enough. The McCain/Palin is so far of the wall that any attempts at parody are likely to fall short of reality. This turned out to be the case with regards for mocking Palin regarding her makeup. A cable television show doesn’t go far enough to parody the extents they are really go to.  The Caucus reports that the highest paid staffer for the campaign over the last couple of weeks was a Hollywood makeup artist:

Who was the highest paid individual in Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October as it headed down the homestretch?

Not Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser; not Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications staffer. It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night.

Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show “So You Think You Can Dance?”, was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records. The campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi’s payment as “Personnel Svc/Equipment.”

In addition, Angela Lew, who is Ms. Palin’s traveling hair stylist, got $10,000 for “Communications Consulting” in the first half of October.

It’s a good thing that Palin wasn’t having the makeup applied to attend a Georgetown cocktail party. If she had, John McCain might have called her an elitist.

I don’t doubt that it is of value to the campaign to have Sarah Palin look good. I guess they didn’t want to risk having her go around in the same pants suits all the time like Hillary Clinton and risk get mocked by David Letterman. The McCain campaign already has enough problems with Letterman and the other late night comics. There is certainly interest in what Palin wears as Sarah Palin’s wardrobe was the top search term at Yahoo this morning.

Spending some money on Palin might be justified, but they seem to be taking this to an outrageous level. Did they think that by making her look pretty enough men would really vote for her? Well, maybe some would, but if this was the strategy McCain might as well have picked Elisabeth Hasselbeck as his running mate. Actually they have now resorted to having her out campaigning.

Maybe the problem isn’t only that they thought a pretty girl could cloud men’s minds sufficiently to vote contrary to the country’s best interests. Perhaps McCain himself was influenced into making a bad choice by the prospect of “having an attractive woman all but singing arias to his greatness.” Kathleen Parker argues that McCain has joined Marc Antony and Bill Clinton in the “pantheon of men who, intoxicated by a woman’s power, made the wrong call.”

5 Comments

  1. 1
    Ralph Lawrence says:

    The McCain campaign,including its absurd efforts regarding the ignorant and stupid Palin, is simply pitiful in its efforts to win this election.

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    Yes, McCain has run a pitiful campaign. The use of Palin’s looks, while stupid, is not the worst mistake of the McCain campaign.

    The three worst mistakes in my view have been:

    1) Moving to the far right (including the choice of Palin) as opposed to fighting Obama for the centrist vote,

    2) Basing the campaign on non-issues such as claims of palling with terrorists and being a celebrity, and

    3) When “issues” are brought up, basing attacks on distortions of the Obama’s views rather than real differences in their opinions. By using these attacks, once people found that Obama did not hold the views McCain claimed, there was no reason left for people to vote for McCain over Obama. For example, it makes little sense for McCain to attack Obama over spending and raising taxes when Obama’s plan gives most people a bigger tax break and McCain’s plan increases the deficit more than Obama’s.

  3. 3
    barnyard says:

    I saw your post about Sarah Palin’s high paid makeup artist. But not sure if you also saw that she had another makeup artist, Tracy Thorp reported in the RNC filings, who has a tax lien of $145,718 (hey, just like Joe “The Plumber”!).  What’s with these guys?  One thing to not want higher taxes – quite another not to pay them at all.
    This was posted yesterday on Martin Eisenstadt’s blog:
    http://www.eisenstadtgroup.com/2008/10/23/the-woman-who-put-lipstick-on-sarah-palin-also-has-a-lien-problem/

    BTW, this was the same guy who leaked much of the story about Joe “The Plumber”, and there’s now a BBC documentary series about him on YouTube:
    http://www.youtube.com/user/youkaysam

  4. 4
    View from Here says:

    There’s an interesting take on Palin’s “consultant” makeup artist here:

    http://my.nowpublic.com/style/sarah-palins-consultant-details-emerge-mccain-scandal#comment-221199

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