Not to put too fine a point on it, but what the hell? Can we please have a moratorium on clothing cracks and questions directed at Clinton? Even if we all like to chatter about this stuff behind the scenes.

That said, I don’t think Clinton gave the right answer. The right answer to “diamonds or pearls?”, at least if you’re running for president, is not that you want them both, it’s: “I wear cubic zirconias.”

That’s what most middle-class women buy these days, because it’s what they can afford.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.