Sarah Palin’s Wardrobe – Much Ado About Nothing

There is definitely a double standard out there. I remember a photo of Hillary making her look like she was 25 years older, that was published everywhere in the medias.

This is another reason why the USA needs a woman at the White House. This has got to stop. I don’t know what women see in Obama. He has tiny shoulders, his ears are sticking out and if you look carefully at his face, he looks like a monkey. And when he is mad, he looks like a devil. This is not a good looking man at all. I don’t understand women to go banana on him. I really don’t.

They have nothing to say against Sarah, she is a very beautiful woman and she has style. So what if the RNC paid for her clothes, it is not the taxpayer’s money? Why should they care? They are really out of arguments to trash Sarah. MSM makes me sick.

This may be interesting:

How good looking is Sarah Palin? I can tell you…exactly.

She is 0.75 on a scale of -1.2 to 1.06.

It seems like nearly every delegate at the Republican Convention last week, following Sarah Palin’s introduction to the world, described her leading qualification as being “a beautiful lady” or some derivative thereof. Putting aside the matter of whether there should be concern that the politically sophisticated attendees at the convention offer this as a qualification for office, it is interesting to note how smitten they seemed to be by her. Is she really all that?

I have a feeling that I will end up mentioning often in this blog that, as political scientists, we don’t have that much scientific to say regarding this election. That is not to say we don’t try, but just that elections are extremely complex phenomenon, and they are hard to measure scientifically.However, I do have something scientific to say about Sarah Palin’s appearance.

There is a buzz around about whether Palin’s looks will help her move from Juneau to Washington. An honest political scientist will tell you that they do not know the answer to that question. However, I can begin to have some informed speculation because I have actually quantified Palin’s looks – as I have those of Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, and hundreds of other politicians. The Grand Old Delegates might be disappointed to learn that their candidate’s appearance is only 0.75. Based on all the chatter about her on websites, such as http://vpilf.com, and the schoolyard talk of some of my Right-minded friends, you might think her supporters are ready to declare her a 10, the fact that my scale only goes to 1.06, not withstanding.

However, despite the seemingly unimpressive score of 0.75, her new throngs of admirers would probably be happy to know (and have their opinion confirmed) that she is far above the average politician, in fact she is firmly in the top 5% of politicians when it comes to looks.

Let me explain how I can claim to know all of this.

My colleagues and I undertook a survey that quantified the “facial competence” of hundreds of candidates for Congress and governor’s mansions, between 1990 and 2006. This was following on the work of the psychologist Alexander Todorov and his colleagues at Princeton. They showed undergraduate students photographs of the faces of competing candidates and asked them to pick the more “competent.” In the journal Science, they demonstrated that the difference between the ratings of which candidate was more competent, correlated, that is matched up, with the difference in actual vote share between the two candidates. The more competent looking candidate won the actual election almost 70% of the time. What’s more, they only flashed these photographs for a very short time, about 1 second. So, the judgements that correlated with election outcomes were actually snap-judgements, not reasoned opinions.

Todorov and his colleagues did not take a position on whether their research means that voters are making decisions about for whom to vote based on who is better looking. It is an intriguing question though, that raises some others. Do people actually even know what candidates for relatively obscure offices, like the United States House of Representatives, look like? If they do, what type of person would actually have their vote changed by this? Would a Republican really vote for a Democrat because the Republican candidate isn’t pretty enough?

In many ways, their finding was compelling and curious: there is well-supported political science evidence that the more attention a person pays to an election, the more likely they are to be a firm believer in one side or the other. So, would a person that pays enough attention that they know what a candidate looks like, and is a firm believer in, say, the GOP, really vote for a Democrat because that Democrat was just so much better looking?

Questions like these led us to undertake a similar study. However, we created a scale that allows a comparison of all candidates, Palin to Biden for example, and not just those candidates that actually ran against each other. To do this, we sat hundreds of UCLA students in front of computer screens and flashed photos of the candidates at them. Instead of just flashing the pairs of candidates that actually ran against each other, we randomly matched candidates, and asked the students to choose which looked more competent. This allowed us to create a scale with a score for the face of every candidate. The numbers don’t mean anything in an absolute sense. The scale is arbitrary, but the numbers have a relative meaning. So, if you like Palin, don’t get too upset about her seemingly low score. I’ll explain how she stacks up against her competitors shortly.

For those of you that like sports, this method of scaling is somewhat similar to how those computer rankings are made for college football. Those rankings allow for two teams that have not played each other to still be compared because the computer keeps track of how they did against common opponents or a team that one team played that played a team that the other team played. Or a team that one played that played a team that played a team that the other played, etc. If there are enough games, these rankings can give a fairly accurate idea of how two teams compare, even though they never actually played each other. Now, for those of you saying that those darn rankings keep your team out of their bowl game every year!, you might be right because in college football, there are not many games, and the accuracy is dependent on the number of games that occur. In our study, each face engaged in hundreds of “games” against other faces — so we are fairly confident about the accuracy of our ratings. Can we separate Palin from Elizabeth Dole who has a score of 0.755 (Palin is actually 0.752)? Not very well (the typical score has a standard error of about 0.11). But we can be almost certain that Palin is far better looking than her opponent Biden. He scored a relatively measly 0.38 (although Biden is still doing better than the mean score of 0.22).

Now, before you express your disgust at having read this far just to have somebody tell you the shocking news that Sarah Palin has a better face than Joe Biden, there is some less obvious information out there. How does Palin compare to other names that were floated for the GOP Vice Presidential nomination? As far as faces go, Palin was a far better choice than the often mentioned Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (-0.14). However, she can’t quite stack up with the even more oft mentioned, and acclaimed as handsome, Mitt Romney (0.93). Of course, there was some quiet chatter about John McCain choosing Texas Senator Kay Baily Hutchison, presumably to court the female vote, as some claim is the reason he chose Palin. When it comes to faces, Palin was the better choice, as Hutchison only came in at 0.56.

How does Palin do against the rejected Democratic VP possibilities? Quite well against Governors Tim Kaine of Virginia (0.11) and Kathleen Sebelius of Indiana (0.14). Even better against Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut (0.05). However, had Barack Obama chosen Evan Bayh of Indiana, he might have stood a chance, facially, against Palin, with a score of 0.63.

In fact, we found across all candidates, for all offices, Republicans, on average, have more competent faces than Democrats. Take that for what you well, but incumbents tend to have more competent faces and Republicans were in the majority for most of the years covered in our survey.

Now you say, what about the politicians we really want to hear about? McCain? Obama? Hillary Clinton? I have not avoided mentioning them for the purposes of suspense. I have no scores for them. In doing the ratings, we removed the photos of candidates that the students were likely to recognize. The idea is to have the students make decisions based on appearance alone, not other opinions they might have about the person. Romney stayed in the sample because in spring 2007, when we conducted the survey, Romney was a nobody – at least to college students – the overwhelming majority of whom could not even identify a photo of their own, long serving Member of Congress, Henry Waxman. Romney, however, was not as much of a nobody as Sarah Palin, even though one of my colleagues now recalls being struck by her beauty when we were preparing the photos for the survey. It seems then, that in getting her face rated, the half-term Governor from Alaska, benefited from her obscurity. The same obscurity that some have argued helped her in becoming a finalist for the position of “heartbeat away” from the most powerful post in the world.

Of course, I did start by giving the “hottest VP candidate ever” only a 0.75. To avoid any accusations of bias on my blog, I should repeat that she is in the top 5% of politicians we rated. The 95th percentile ain’t bad. I don’t know if it will satisfy her most ardent supporters, but this means we can give her a 9.5 out of 10 (scientifically speaking).

I guess Katie’s a little behind on the Post retraction.

It is a non story (Cindy spends this much on a single outfit). This is one of the pointless distractions Obama’s always complaining about.

UnFit, UnFit,

Cindy buys her clothes with her own money. I guess this must be irritating for a leftist jerk like yourself. Imagine, she has more money than you. Send her to jail and hang her, right, UnFitUnFit?

Well Sarah, if it makes you feel any better, what Gov. Palin is wearing now is not much different than what she wore while Gov. in Alaska, go check out the Alaska Governor’s site, plenty of photos. She just no longer wears a ski jacket over her outfits out on the campaign trail.

Her personal wardrobe wasn’t enough for someone making 3-5 appearances a day, everyday. Instead of packing up everything she owned, the campaign provided for her and family out of convenience for the campaign.

Being from Illinois, I remember when Carol Mosely Braun ran for Pres. she not only refurbished her wardrobe, her jewelry, bought a new auto, she did the same for her boyfriend, then they took a trip to Africa. But, it was only reported locally, if memory serves, unlike Sarah Palin where the national media reports anything that can be spun into a negative.

BTW, I don’t think she “acts” like common folk, I think she “is” common folk.

Fit Fit

Is that the best you got?????????

CentFla, you read my mind. I won’t make $150,000 in three years, and that was spent that in one month on clothes? I actually don’t fault Sarah, I fault the elitist wealthy Republican operatives who bought the clothes and (most likely) encouraged her to drop her own look, which was much more real and just as darn good, for the look of a NYC socialite fashionista. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now she looks like an opportunistic hypocrite, and hey, maybe she is. All I know is that these people don’t represent me any longer. The Obamas, Townhall revealed earlier today, spent about 2% of Palin’s budget on clothes, and most of what they got is from American designers, or at least sold from stores like the Gap and H&M that are affordable for all of us.

This is a stupid, silly distraction, I agree – but it speaks volumes to how disconnected the Republican party elites have become from real people, with real economic troubles, who couldn’t in the their dreams spend that kind of money on what – 7 outfits? I’m disgusted and saddened by this whole mess. Sarah should bolt the party and run on her own as an independent in 2012 – she’d get my vote – as long as she lives and acts like a Wal-Mart Hockey mom, and not some NYC socialite.

From CentFla.

“Missy if you really think that she is “common folk” then the spin is working well on you.”

Included in one of the links Mata provided was this little nugget that suggests that while she is wearing clothing on loan from the RNC out on the campaign. she evidently is still “common folk”:

“Palin frequently shops for used clothing for herself and her family. Just before she was offered the VP nomination, Palin went on a family expedition to a secondhand store called Out of the Closet. A saleswoman named Alison said Palin frequently visits the shop and the shop owner Ms. Arvold says Palin has been shopping at Out of the Closet for years and she noticed Palin on TV wearing used clothing from the shop (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1221…ys_us_page_one).”

Perhaps the RNC wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of Sarah Palin, VP candidate for the United States, wearing second hand clothing while meeting world leaders at the UN. Might be why they chipped in for the wardrobe for the seven members of Palin’s family.

What I find hypocritical is Michelle Obama going on the View, announcing that her dress was only $100 to give the impression that she is a frugal shopper, just like the “common folk.” Quite deceptive.

Included in one of the links Mata provided was this little nugget that suggests that while she is wearing clothing on loan from the RNC out on the campaign. she evidently is still “common folk”

Yes, the spin is indeed working quite well on you.

I really do not know how to respond to your comment about Michelle Obama, but this thread is not about her anyway. But I will try: How is Mrs. Obama wearing a $100 dress deceptive? Is it different than calling yourself a Wal-Mart Mom while wearing clothes that cost more than a Wal-Mart employee makes in one year?

I am not voting for a ticket which includes Michelle Obama by the way.

Lisa Schiffren at The Corner made some good points, among the best was this:

Instead, she had zero time and no personal fortune. And she faced the terrible hurdle of being young and attractive — the very sort of woman who most desperately needs wardrobe cues to make her look authoritative. If she had had to pay for it herself, she could not have run. The bill would have been ruinous to a genuinely middle class person. So the GOP did what it had to do in order to put a non-rich woman on a national ticket. Whatever one thinks of the choice — and I am a supporter — it’s nice to see that someone was thinking about the details. The difference between Palin at the announcement in Dayton, and Palin at the convention was a subtle but impressive transformation. Subtle always costs more. As a sometime GOP donor, I begrudge her none of it.

There is a “look” that is expected for people who are going to be on television and fullfill certain roles in national society. Sarah Palin’s borrowed wardrobe does not set her apart — it makes her blend in with the media and government crowd she runs in. Men, at least, do not look at her outfits and think, “I bet that costs a lot.” The amount of money spent on her and her family just makes them look like they belong on TV and on stages talking to voters.

If your complaint is that “average” people can’t run for office, then I’ll join your complaint — but that’s a fight with societal expectations. I think you have to pick your battles, and given that the RNC has to run with the economy, the incumbency, the press and The One against them, it seems prudent to just pay what it takes to have your candidate look like a candidate and leave the fight against Elite Clothesism for another election. I’d love to see her run for re-election in her fleece and bunny boots but this is not the election to do that.

Jan’s evidently starting early to discredit a Palin run in 2012. Scared, Jan? Try to keep your scandal mongering down to a single post, and appropriate thread, pls.

Mata