populism punctured: Palin's privilege problem

Ouch. This one's gonna leave a mark.

Over the span of a week or so, the McCain campaign treated Sarah Palin to a shopping spree -- at Neiman's and Saks Fifth Avenue, among other high tone outfitters -- to the tune of over $150,000, which is almost three times the median household income, at a time when Americans are facing extreme economic hardship and anxiety, apparently undertaken so that she can look splendorific while parading around "real America" practicing her patented brand of "she's one of us" identity populism politics.

Plus, on the same day, this story comes out, wherein it is revealed that Sarah Palin carted her human political props (her children) around the country on the taxpayers' dime, only later to "amend" her expense reports to reflect that these children were somehow "conducting official state business".

As they say in my weekly staff meetings, the "optics" of this are nothing short of horrific. In other words, this won't exactly go over well with the barking mass of $30k/year millionaires who have miraculously been duped into supporting Republicans despite the rather obvious fact that their regressive tax policies: (1) only benefit people who can actually afford to buy their Vera Wang purses at Neiman Marcus, while (2) harming those unfortunate people (i.e., the barking mass) who must charge such things on their over-extended credit cards and then struggle to make the minimum payments once they realize that their HELOC privileges have mysteriously been revoked.

I suggest that these stories may go some way toward driving these points home, even through the rotten protein-muck that stands in for these people's brains.