Commentary - Eve Fairbanks: New wave of hair splitting cuts politics too closely

First there was Sanjaya Malakar, the lush-locked 17-year-old contestant on “American Idol” whose wondrous hair led America to keep him on the show much longer than his puny voice merited.

He finally got booted off this week, and, within hours, was booked to come to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past weekend to greet his Washington fans. Journalists of every stripe were going around looking for him; unbelievably, he was perceived to be the biggest star in attendance, including President George W. Bush.

Then came presidential candidate John Edwards, victim of the opposite impulse of our hair morality: The idea that fussing with your hair too much is unmanly (with Sanjaya, we thought it was charming).

When Edwards released his first-quarter campaign expenditures a week ago, it came out that he’d used $800 in campaign money for two haircuts by Hollywood hair artist Joseph Torrenueva. Last Wednesday, when the Virginia Tech massacre was still dominating the airwaves, the haircut story merited a top headline on CNN’s Web site.

The haircut set the blogs and Edwards’s critics aflutter. Of course, the criticism went, it makes him look a little effeminate, but, more than that, it undercuts his commitment to attacking poverty, the cornerstone of his campaign.

On National Review’s blog, a commenter complained, “Isn’t he supposed to be the ‘working man’s candidate’?” When Edwards went to give a speech in Michigan, the state Republican Party chairman released a statement: “The amount of money that Edwards spends on a haircut is more than an unemployed Michigan citizen can receive for the entire week. Edwards clearly lives in a world apart from the average everyday citizen.”

Not a few Democrats also expressed disgust. “America has revered such homely leaders as Abe Lincoln,” Maureen Dowd preached in the New York Times, before sneering, “When you spend more on a couple of haircuts than Burundi’s per capita G.D.P., it looks so vain … [Edwards] seems intent on proving that he is a Breck Girl — and a Material Boy.”

Edwards had to pay back the $800 for the haircuts — rightly, since stylings from Joseph Torrenueva were probably not what Edwards donors hoped their campaign contributions would buy. But it’s idiotic to bash Edwards for getting the haircuts in the first place.

It’s nice to think we could elect a homely Abe Lincoln today, a guy who gets his hair cut at a no-nonsense corner barber — or, for even more man-of-the-people authenticity, a candidate who has lost his hair altogether. After all, fully half of American men are balding — shouldn’t our candidates stand with these men in their affliction? But we haven’t elected a bald president since Eisenhower, and he was elected in that merciful era before TV.

Just before Edwards’ haircut flap, Fox News ran a story, “Is America ready for a bald president?” (The implicit answer was no.) The quaint idea that American guys are manfully free of vanity over their hair can be summarily dispatched by considering the estimated amount of money spent every year in America for mousses, ointments and plugs to combat baldness: $7 billion. In political campaigns, hair is a little-discussed but crucial factor. Edwards is a rich man, so why shouldn’t he do what he can to give himself a leg up in the hair department?

Speaking of Edwards’ money, the even stupider aspect of the haircut furor is the idea that if Edwards really cared about poverty, he wouldn’t be so rich or dispense money for comforts like fancy haircuts and big houses.

In our society, we don’t believe that honest commitment to a social problem is only proved by symbolically living that problem — by, say, assuming a monkish asceticism to truly feel poverty. Bill Gates can be a great philanthropist while owning an ostentatious estate; nobody asks him to give up his money.

To say Edwards’ concern for poverty is fake because he pays a rich person’s fee for a haircut is buying into an argument that conservatives loathe when applied to their own: the chickenhawk attack.

Liberals’ chickenhawk attack on the Iraq war asserts that its civilian architects are wrong to declare war because they’ve never served in the military. Just as critics of the haircut believe Edwards ought to act middle-class if he wants to fix the middle class, war critics who cry “chickenhawk” believe Bush ought to serve in an attack if he wants to order one.

If you think that idea is silly, you should laugh off the haircut assault, too.

But the best rebuttal of the haircut criticism probably comes from Edwards himself. Instead of blowing it off, he went right ahead and embraced the haircut’s symbolism: Immigrants, he joked, “ want to come here because people like me … the son of a mill worker … can now be running for president and paying $400 for a haircut.”

Examiner columnist Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor of The New Republic.