An item in a Newsweek story: “At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. ‘I’ll be just a minute,’ she said.”
On MSNBC Wednesday, Andrea Mitchell referred to the story and seemed to chastise Palin for not putting more clothes on when she popped out to tell her male briefers she’d be “just a minute.”
It seems from here that says more about Mitchell than about Palin, and about and old generation more than young. Mitchell is 62, born and raised in a time when the thought of a woman clad less than neck to toenails was scandalous. Sarah Palin is 44, well aware of her appearance, equally comfortable in jeans or $10,000 gown.
In Mitchell’s time, a shapely young woman in a bath towel would have been advertising sexual favors for her spot on the ticket. In Palin’s, men who think “getting comfortable” means “let’s f—” are in for some serious disappointment.
The story, and its subsequent treatment, begs the question whether, had those same male briefers come in the room and John McCain appeared in his boxers, what would have been the response from the press on hearing the story.
