by Evie Stone

Good morning, all. It's Thursday, we're 12 days out, the Dow keeps yo-yoing, and new jobless claims for last week were higher than expected. At least the sun is shining in Washington.

But who cares about the tanking economy, tax policy, or the wars when we can be talking about Sarah Palin's RNC wardrobe budget? Politico finds stylists who say the outlay was "money well spent" to make her appearance job-appropriate. The NYT says you can't even tell the difference between Palin's fancy new threads and her regular old ones (quoting Glamour editor Cindi Leive, whose first reaction to the story was, awesomely, "Honey, I could have dressed you for a lot less than that"). WP's fashion columnist Robin Givhan thinks the sprees damage Palin's everywoman image and the campaign should have taken her to J. Crew and Ann Taylor. The LA Times says reaction to the spending falls (surprise!) along party lines. And former McCain strategist-turned-campaign-irritant Mike Murphy offers a few humorous suggestions on how the campaign can spin the story. Sample: "William Ayers is a terrorist!"

 

Barack Obama heads to Hawaii today to visit his ailing grandmother. Before leaving, he did some damage control on Joe Biden's recent comments that if Obama is elected he will face a "generated crisis to test [his] mettle," later citing JFK's leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obama told reporters yesterday, flanked by his defense and foreign policy advisers, that any presidential transition is a dangerous time (noting that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently made a similar point), and that Biden's statement was a typical "rhetorical flourish" from the famously motor-mouthed Senator. John McCain has seized on the gaffe to remind voters of his experience with security scares, specifically that he served on an aircraft carrier near Cuba during the 1963 crisis. McCain has held an advantage over Obama on national security issues throughout the campaign, but recent polling shows increasing voter confidence that Obama would make a good commander-in-chief. Bringing national security back into the spotlight could shore up some support for McCain at a time when the economy has reigned supreme on the campaign trail.

And finally, Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that recent press coverage of McCain has been more negative than coverage of Obama. The stats:

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.

But Pew hastens to add that media bias may not be to blame, suggesting that the sociology of this part of the campaign informed the press's stories.

Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments. In many ways, the arc of the media narrative during this phase of the 2008 general election might be best described as a drama in which John McCain has acted and Barack Obama has reacted.

Politico's Michael Calderone says that's a risk the McCain campaign took knowingly:

"We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us," spokesman Brian Rogers told Politico last month, adding later that "we intend to stay on offense."

(Indeed, the Wisconsin Advertising Project recently found that during one of the weeks this study covers, McCain ran almost exclusively negative TV ads.)

The Pew study also found that Joe Biden has been covered much more negatively than Sarah Palin has — though she rode a bit of a roller coaster from highly positive to highly negative press attention.