Seventeen days ago, The Politico ran a blog item about John Edwards getting a $400 haircut. As you no doubt recall, it made the rounds extraordinarily quickly, even generating a question at last week’s debate. By and large, there’s not much more to say about it; the “news” angle has been relegated to the late-night comedians.
That is, except for The Politico’s top political columnist, Roger Simon, who devoted his column to the subject today.
It is the haircut that will not die.
He can spin it, he can gel it, he can mousse it. But it is not going away.
John Edwards’ $400 haircuts will live forever.
The column has a wonderful circular quality to it. Simon is thinking about it, Simon is writing about it, so therefore Simon believes the story continues to be fascinating. He must be right because, lo and behold, there’s a 660-word column on the subject, 17 days later, right there on The Politico.
As it happens, Simon’s column seems to apologize for itself. He wrote, “I was willing never to write about the haircuts again.” A few paragraphs later, he adds, “I was not going to write about this again.”
Apparently, however, he just couldn’t help himself. You’ll never guess why.
As I say, I was not going to write about this again. But Wednesday morning I opened up my USA Today and saw on the letters page a picture of John Edwards next to a letter from Richard King of Olympia, Wash.
King wrote: “Spending $400 for a haircut shows a lack of judgment. I don’t care how wealthy he is, Edwards cannot be expected to carefully steward the public purse when he obviously cannot control his own spending.”
In other words, the senior political columnist for a burgeoning political news outlet devoted an entire column to a 17-day-old subject, which wasn’t all that fascinating in the first place, because someone sent a letter to the editor to USA Today.
Of course, that’s not the only reason.
Think that is bad? That is not bad. This is bad: When you go to Google and enter “Edwards haircut,” the first item that comes up is a story by Bill Wundram in The Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa…. The article got 324 comments from readers.
Apparently, a Google search on Edwards and a haircut will lead readers to an article about Edwards and a haircut. I know, I was surprised, too.
See? This is “the haircut that will not die” by virtue of the fact that Roger Simon says so. He read a USA Today letter and a 17-day-old article about it, so it must be true.
Glenn Greenwald noted today, “This is at least the eighth time that The Politico — which gloriously “broke” the story — has referenced Edwards’ haircut.”
It’s about seven times too many.