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I've been trying to formulate an opinion about Sarah Palin’s new wardrobe, and I confess that the whole subject bothers me more than it should. On the one hand, I agree with the pragmatist bloggers that one needs to dress the part, and that faced with about six minutes in which to get Palin ready for her close-up, the RNC opted to throw money at the problem. (Anyone who saw the "before" snap of Palin in this baffling folk-elf outfit will understand that the woman needed at least some help.) On the other hand, I also agree with the purist bloggers that spending $150,000 on incredibly high-end designer duds not only looks bad to Joe the Plumber, but also turns Palin from Joe Sixpack into Empress Josephine. Still, the whole subject continues to make me queasy for some of the reasons Meghan explored: It is really, really different to be a woman in the public eye. The standards for looking “good” are completely unfair, and the stakes are vastly higher for failing to do so. We obsessed about John Edwards' haircut because a bad haircut truly wouldn’t have mattered. We obsessed over Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, or her pantsuits, or her highlights because they matter so much.
We could certainly wish that two kindly mice name Gus and Jacques had sewn all of Palin’s outfits for free on the night of Aug. 29, 2008, but maybe that whole Cinderella story says more about the relationship between women and beautiful clothes than we care to admit.
So I am going to have to side with the women (anyone notice a generational division opening up here?) who think that when it comes to looking up to the job, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Nevertheless, the whole Pygmalion subplot, wherein Palin is a life-sized "teachable" Barbie doll, continues to leave me cold.
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I agree with you, Meghan, that woman have never settled on a comfortable uniform for power. And that opens up all kinds of possibilities. But they are not all bad. Think about it this way. We don't talk about every powerful female politicians' clothing. Nobody analyzes what Barbara Boxer wears to a hearing, or Olympia Snowe, even though they are both perfectly attractive. I think the place we are at now is that, for women, people say attractive when they mean charismatic. In Jane Mayer's piece, you can see the men around Palin struggling to come up with the right words to describe this awestruck feeling they have. They settle on demeaning ones—"pretty," "knockout"—but what they are describing is some kind of force she has that they can't quite put into words. This same phenomenon happened to Segolene Royal, the French Socialist candidate. People talked about her bikinis, and her flirty little skirts, but they were really talking about something else.
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