In the end, it’s not the amount of money that the Republican Party spent on Sarah Palin’s clothing that’s truly offensive.

What is most revealing about the fraudulent nature of the Palin choice is on display here in other ways.

First is that the Republicans felt the need to dress Sarah Palin, as if she were, well, a doll, a prop. While they claimed they picked her for her independence, they really chose her because they thought they could control her. For the men surrounding John McCain, Sarah Palin was a mannequin which they could dress and manipulate as they liked—a political blow-up doll.

Which brings me to the second most important thing about the clothing controversy.

The clothing they picked for her emphasized very specific qualities: glamour and sex appeal.

Palin has presented herself as a small-town woman—though apparently she was happy to discard her small-town clothes—a GOP feminist analogue to Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side.

But the clothing choices made for Palin show what a bogus and cynical claim that is.

When the Republican men picked her—and John McCain in particular—they thought of her in the way that powerful Republican Party males tend to think of women: as a sex object. They may not have admitted it to themselves, but consider it this way: If Sarah Palin looked like, say, Rachel Maddow, would John MCain have chosen her in a million years?

The GOP powerbrokers didn’t pick clothes for Palin that emphasized her empathy with voters, or her working-class origins, or her Alaskan toughness, or any other combination of politically appealing qualities.

They picked clothes that made her look hot.

And Palin played along with the fantasy. For her, running for vice-president was really no different than walking on a stage in a bathing suit. She was selling the same things: a nice smile, a good body, the ability to deliver a few words in public, a willingness to do whatever the judges wanted.

So she put on the form-fitting outfits, she let her hair down and shook it out, she put on shoes with three-inch heels that couldn’t have been less practical for the work of campaigning. And on national television, she winked at all the men checking her out. And like all aspiring beauty queens, she reveled in the attention because it made her feel alive, made her feel desired. The whole country is looking at me!

This clothing brouhaha is not just a mini-scandal, then, not just a political gaffe. It’s a meaningful incident because it lays bare the sexist attitudes that the powerful men at the highest levels of the Republican party have about women.

In their heads, they tried to pass her off as a conservative rival to Hillary Clinton, though in grit, intellect, experience and substance, she was clearly no Hillary Clinton.

But another part of their bodies won out.

(Photos from the New York Times)