Sarah Palin Spending $150K on Clothes
Friday, October 24th, 2008Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, on whom the GOP has lavished $150,000 for designer clothes and beauty services, says her family shops frugally back home in Alaska and her favorite store is a consignment shop.
Purchases by the Republican National Committee at high-end department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus appeared in spending reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. They offered a stark contrast to Palin’s image as a “hockey mom” who calls herself part of an average, middle-class American family.
“Those clothes are not my property. We had three days of using clothes that the RNC purchased,” Palin told Fox News in an interview that aired Thursday night.
“If people knew how Todd and I and our kids shop so frugally. My favorite shop is a consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska, called Out of the Closet. And my shoe store is called Shoe Fly in Juneau, Alaska. … It’s not, you know, Fifth Avenue-type of shopping.”
In one shopping spree for Palin, the RNC spent $75,062 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis. It also spent $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue and $4,902 at Atelier, a stylish men’s store, and paid $92 for a romper and matching hat with ears for her infant son, Trig, at Pacifier, a Minneapolis baby store.
The McCain campaign reported paying $13,200 in September to celebrity makeup artist Amy Strozzi, who works on the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance.” She was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October, nearly double what the campaign paid McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, according to a filing report.
Palin said the clothing purchased by the RNC would be returned or donated to charities.