Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (9 page)

That “I Feel Pretty” video alone has been viewed in excess of one million times on YouTube.

GOP operatives repeatedly referred to Edwards during the 2004 campaign as “the Breck Girl,” a slur disseminated most helpfully by the
New York Times
political reporter Adam Nagourney. Nagourney, in a front-page
Times
article at the height of the 2004 campaign, actually granted anonymity to his “sources,” whom he described as “Bush officials,” to sling that emasculating insult at Edwards. (In this same ignominious article, Nagourney mindlessly parroted the same anonymous cowards as saying that Kerry “looks French,” leading to that “observation” becoming a favorite anti-Kerry insult of the national media throughout the campaign.)

Three years later, in April 2007—in the midst of the Edwards hair “controversy”—Nagourney wrote in the
New York Times
about his 2004 hit piece, sheepishly acknowledging the significant role the “looks French” and “Breck Girl” attacks he published played in demeaning the personalities of Kerry and Edwards during the election:

Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it.

It apparently took Nagourney three years of deep contemplation to realize that turning over the front pages of the
New York Times
to anonymous partisan smear artists might actually end up bolstering their smears and cementing them in our national political dialogue.

But Nagourney’s efforts were merely one component of the right-wing-machine/media onslaught that promoted—and continues to promote—the “Edwards Is a Faggot Girl” slur. Throughout 2007, with Smith’s
Politico
story as the fuel, Rush Limbaugh regularly posted Photoshopped pictures on his website of Edwards as an androgynous womanly freak, with long flowing hair, eye shadow, and lipstick. The
New York Sun
published an article headlined: “Could John Edwards Become the First Woman President?” a question then repeated by the likes of Limbaugh and the
Wall Street Journal
’s James Taranto. And Ann Coulter capped the smear in April 2007 by famously appearing at one of the most prestigious conservative events and outright calling Edwards a “faggot.”

From the time Smith first “broke” the Edwards haircut story on April 16 until May 2,
The Politico
itself ran no fewer than eight separate stories on Edwards’s hair, at one point even publishing an “investigative piece” in which it interviewed the hairstylist and analyzed the stylist’s pricing structures. Drudge prominently featured multiple Edwards hair stories.

One can see the validity of Halperin and Harris’s coronation of Drudge as the leader of our nation’s political press by simply reviewing the tidal wave of establishment media outlets that dutifully reported the Edwards hair story after Drudge pushed it. In fact, it is not hyperbole to say that, for the two weeks following Smith’s “scoop,” the Edwards haircut issue was one of the most reported political stories in the nation. And the establishment press not only reported the facts of Edwards’s haircut but eagerly promoted the central derisive narrative—that his haircuts demonstrate, yet again, Edwards’s girlish obsession with his hair.

The day after Drudge touted Smith’s story, the Associated Press churned out an article, published by CNN (among others), that began: “
Looking pretty
is costing John Edwards’ presidential campaign a lot of pennies.” The Associated Press then interviewed Edwards’s hairstylist and reported that the stylist confessed: “‘I do cut his hair and I have cut it for quite a while,’ Torrenueva said. ‘We’ve been friends a long time.’”

All of that led
The New Republic,
a day late but still right on script, to lament the effeminate and vain Edwards.
TNR
’s Eve Fairbanks posted an item on the magazine’s website that she headlined “He Feels Pretty and Witty, and…” in which she let us know that she (of course) is far too sophisticated and serious to “give a damn that Edwards went to the Pink Sapphire.” After dutifully reporting the item (that she is much too serious to care about), she then linked to the same three-year-old YouTube clip of Edwards brushing his hair to the “I Feel Pretty” song.

Fairbanks justified her post by claiming that “the fact that the haircut and the Pink Sapphire is a CNN top headline on a huge news day suggests that, sadly, plenty of people still think of Edwards like this,” the “this” referencing the YouTube clip. In her world, the media’s chatter—in which (as she herself was doing) they repeat Drudge gossip—is proof of how “plenty of people” think. As always, Drudge rules their world and they become his echo chamber. If he selects a petty, personality-smearing story to trumpet, and the media (as they always do) dutifully follows, then that alone constitutes “proof” of the story’s importance, evidence that “plenty of people” care about it, which in turn justifies the media’s continuous chatter about it.

Most certainly, the press will pretend to be above it all (“this is not something that we, the sophisticated political journalists, care about, of course”). But they yammer about Drudge-promoted gossip endlessly, and then insist that their own chattering is proof that it is an important story that people care about. And because they conclude that “people” (i.e., them) are concerned with the story, they keep chirping about it, which in turn fuels their belief that the story is important. It is an endless loop of self-referential narcissism—whatever they endlessly sputter is what “the people” care about, and therefore they must keep harping on it, because their chatter is proof of its importance.

Illustrating this cycle perfectly, Howard Kurtz—the media critic for the
Washington Post
and CNN—defended the intense coverage of Smith’s story about Edwards’s haircut, writing: “You might think that this would be too trivial to spark a major online debate, but hair matters, apparently. It’s a metaphor for…well, for something very important.” The haircut item was not only highlighted, but repeatedly harped on, by virtually every significant news outlet. As Media Matters documented:

• The
New York Times
reported on the story twice, and the haircuts were the subject of
Times
columnist Maureen Dowd’s April 21 column. The
Washington Post
mentioned the haircuts in five articles, while the
Los Angeles Times
mentioned them twice.
USA Today
mentioned them once.

• The AP referred to the haircuts in five articles, including the April 17 article that labeled Edwards as “pretty.”

• NBC and CBS reported on Edwards’s haircuts twice, and ABC reported on them once.

• CNN referred to the haircuts at least six times, MSNBC at least three times, and Fox News at least five times.

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters added:

In its Conventional Wisdom Watch column,
Newsweek
placed The Haircut directly behind the Virginia Tech massacre and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ Senate testimony as that week’s most important news events.

And a
New York Times
Week in Review piece included a roundup of key news developments and highlighted the surging stock market, the rise of the British pound, the record-setting amount of mutual funds distributed to investors last year, and yes, Edwards’ costly trim.

This idiocy reached its zenith when NBC News anchor Brian Williams asked Edwards about his haircuts during the April 26, 2007, Democratic presidential debate. A mere two days earlier, Williams had appeared on
The Late Show with David Letterman
and discussed the Edwards Hair Story at length.

Williams—whose annual salary is $10 million and who, according to Boehlert, “lives in a restored farmhouse in Connecticut where he parks his 477-horsepower black Porsche GT2 (that is, when he’s not decamping on the Upper East Side)”—snidely and quite improbably claimed on Letterman’s show that the most expensive haircut he ever received was priced at $12. Though he agreed that the Edwards haircut story was “silly” and there was “no reason for us to continue talking about it”—even as he talked about it—Williams then proceeded two days later, during a nationally televised presidential debate, to ask Edwards about his haircuts as the second question he posed to the candidate.

Days later, Mike Huckabee raised the issue during a Republican presidential debate by remarking: “We’ve had a Congress that’s spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.” And amazingly, NBC’s Tim Russert, while moderating a Democratic presidential debate on September 26, 2007—a full five months after Smith first “broke” the story—became the second NBC journalist to use his time in a presidential debate to inquire of Edwards about his hair:

Your campaign has hit some obstacles with revelations about $400 haircuts, half-million dollars working for a hedge fund, $800,000 from Rupert Murdoch. Do you wish you hadn’t taken money in all those cases or hadn’t made that kind of expenditure for a haircut?

In December 2007, the
Wall St. Journal
’s Peggy Noonan offered up a Santa-like checklist of which presidential candidates were “reasonable” and which ones were not. In describing the attributes that Americans want in a president, she wrote, “I claim here to speak for thousands, millions.” On behalf of the throngs for whom she fantasizes she speaks, Noonan proclaimed, “We are grown-ups…We’d like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.”

This “grown-up” then proceeded to pronounce that all GOP candidates except Mike Huckabee were “reasonable”—as were Biden, Dodd, Richardson, and Obama (though too young and inexperienced to be president)—but this is what she wrote about John Edwards:

John Edwards is not reasonable…[W]e can’t have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can’t.

What is notable here is not so much the specific petty attacks, but rather the method by which they are disseminated and then entrenched as conventional wisdom among our Really Smart Political Insiders and Serious Journalists. This is the endlessly repeated process that drives political coverage of our candidates:

STEP 1
A new Drudge-dependent gossip (Ben Smith) at a new substance-free political rag (
The Politico
)—or some right-wing talk-radio host (Rush Limbaugh) or some credibility-bereft right-wing blogger (a Michelle Malkin)—seizes on some petty, manufactured incident to fuel clichéd caricatures of Democratic candidates.

STEP 2
The old right-wing gossip (Drudge) employs his old, substance-free political rag (The Drudge Report) to amplify the inane caricatures.

STEP 3
National media outlets, such as AP and CNN, whose world is ruled by Drudge, take note of and begin “analyzing” the “political implications” of the gossip, thus transforming it into “news stories.”

STEP 4
Our Serious Beltway Journalists and Political Analysts—in the Haircut Case, Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Adam Nagourney and the very serious and smart Substantive Journalists at
The New Republic—
mindlessly repeat all of it, thereby solidifying it as transpartisan conventional wisdom.

STEP 5
When called upon to justify their endless reporting over such petty and pointless Drudge-generated matters, these “journalists” cite Steps 1–4 as “proof” that “the people” care about these stories, even though the “evidence” consists of nothing other than their own flocklike chirping.

To observe this self-reinforcing behavior in action, one can look at
The Politico
’s tenacious follow-up on its Haircut Scoop. On May 2,
The Politico
’s so-called chief political columnist, Roger Simon, published a 674-word article—prominently touted on
The Politico
’s front page—exclusively about Edwards’s haircuts, very cleverly headlined “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.” That May 2 article by Simon was his second on this topic. Simon began his article by pronouncing:

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.

Simon marveled at how enduring the story is, as though there was some phenomenon keeping it alive independent of the fact that the gossipy, tiny-minded, substance-free “political journalists” plaguing our nation—from Roger Simon and Maureen Dowd, to Adam Nagourney, Mickey Kaus, and Matt Drudge—had not stopped harping on it. That is tantamount to someone who keeps chewing their food and spitting it across the room and then marveling at how filthy things are and writing columns bewilderingly examining how and why the floor is covered with food and what that all signifies.

Even
The Politico—
for which no story is too petty or Drudge-like—seemed embarrassed by its obsession. Thus, Simon claimed in his article that he “was willing never to write about the haircuts again,” and
The Politico
’s front-page headline claimed: “Roger
reluctantly
takes another look at the haircut that will not die.” In the article itself, Simon offered up this excuse for why he was writing his “newspaper’s” eighth story in less than two weeks about John Edwards’s hair: