Opinion: Those designer duds for Sarah Palin and her family? Some, unworn, have already been returned
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Some of the clothes, worth a reported $150,000, purchased by the Republican National Committee to outfit vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family have already been ‘given back,’ John McCain said this morning on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’
To hear Palin’s own comments on the clothes controversy, view the video by clicking on the Read more line below.
‘Look, she lives a frugal life,’ McCain told the show’s moderator, Tom Brokaw. ‘She and her family are not wealthy. She and her family were thrust into this, and there was some -- and some third of that money is given back. The rest will be donated to charity.’
McCain senior advisor Mark Salter told The Times’ Bob Drogin this morning that about a third of the items went back immediately, before they were worn in public, because they were the wrong size or not to Palin’s taste.
The McCain-Palin campaign has taken considerable heat since it was disclosed on Oct. 21 that within days of Palin’s....
...selection for the ticket, a GOP operative had gone on a spending spree at Saks Fifth Avenue ($49,425), Neiman Marcus ($75,062) and several pricey boutiques. When she gave her acceptance speech to the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin wore a $2,500 ivory silk shantung jacket by the Italian designer Valentino, reportedly purchased at Saks.
On Friday, in a bit of damage control, Palin told Fox News that her favorite store was Out of the Closet, a consignment shop in Anchorage, and she elaborated on the topic today during a campaign stop in Tampa, Fla.:
“Those clothes -- they are not my property, just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the RNC purchased. I am not taking them with me. I am back to wearing my own clothes from my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska.”
She also told the Tampa crowd about some of the accessories she was wearing:
‘Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of accessories, didn’t think that we would be talking about it, but my earrings -- I see a Native Americans for Palin poster. These are beaded earrings from Todd’s mom, who is a Yupik Eskimo up in Alaska, Native American, Native Alaskan. And my wedding ring -- it’s in Todd’s pocket ‘cause it hurts sometimes when I shake hands and it gets squished -- a $35 wedding ring from Hawaii that I bought myself and ‘cause I always thought with my ring it’s not what it’s made of, it’s what it represents, and 20 years later, happy to wear it.”
--Leslie Hoffecker
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