Sarah "Soccer Mom" Palin's $150,000 Wardrobe

While Sarah Palin claims to be an average Jane who relates to everyday Americans and is being marketed as such to the Kool-Aid drinking GOP base, the RNC's decision to spend $150,000 for a new wardrobe certain belies the claim. In today's bleak economy, spending the equivalent to 2 or 3 times the annual income of many struggling families is somewhat obscene, not to mention stupid. It has riled up many GOP contributors while also handing a bat to Palin's detractors to beat her down further. I like many other also wonder if Palin will treat this $150,000 windfall as taxable income as some tax experts say will be necessary. As I posted some time back, there are already some question as to whether or not Palin and the "First Dude" cheated on their past tax returns. Here are some highlights from the New York Time's tax on Sarah Palin's "wardrobe malfunction.":

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Sarah Palin’s wardrobe joined the ranks of symbolic political excess on Wednesday, alongside John McCain’s multiple houses and John Edwards’s $400 haircut, as Republicans expressed fear that weeks of tailoring Ms. Palin as an average “hockey mom” would fray amid revelations that the Republican Party outfitted her with expensive clothing from high-end stores.

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[C]ampaign finance reports confirmed that the Republican National Committee spent $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue in September for Ms. Palin and her family. Advisers to Ms. Palin said on Wednesday that the purchases — which totaled about $150,000 and were classified as “campaign accessories” — were made on the fly after Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, was chosen as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. . .

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Yet Republicans expressed consternation publicly and privately that the shopping sprees on her behalf, which were first reported by Politico, would compromise Ms. Palin’s standing as Senator McCain’s chief emissary to working-class voters whose salvos at the so-called cultural elite often delight audiences at Republican rallies.

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“It looks like nobody with a political antenna was working on this,” said Ed Rollins, a Republican political consultant who ran President Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984. “It just undercuts Palin’s whole image as a hockey mom, a ‘one-of-us’ kind of candidate.” Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, have been described as elitist by both Republicans and Democrats at times, and so much was made when she appeared on “The View” in June in a black-and-white patterned dress. Turns out it sold for $148 at an off-the-rack store.

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More than $130,000 of the charges used to outfit Ms. Palin and her family were initially footed by Jeff Larson, a prominent Republican consultant in St. Paul whose firm has been tied to the onslaught of negative robocalls about Mr. Obama from Mr. McCain’s campaign. . . . Federal Election Commission records showed Mr. Larson was reimbursed by the Republican National Committee for charges at Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Barneys New York and Atelier New York, a men’s clothing store.Sarah Palin, N