The Breck girl and (tax-funded?) haircuts

By | Thursday, January 24, 2008

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John Edwards has acknowledged that one haircut (and almost certainly at least two others) he received during the 2004 general-election campaign, when he was the Democrats' vice presidential nominee, cost $1,250. His staff insists that Mr. Edwards paid for the haircuts himself, but it has declined to provide the evidence in the form of cancelled checks or credit-card statements. During the first quarter of last year, the Edwards campaign paid for two haircuts costing $400 each before Mr. Edwards reimbursed the campaign after the press revealed the payments. Why does this matter?

It matters because the 2004 Democratic ticket of Kerry-Edwards received $75 million in taxpayer funds to conduct their general-election campaign. And Mr. Edwards has recently taken out a multimillion-dollar bank loan, which he has collateralized by pledging some of the $8.8 million in taxpayer-financed matching funds for which he qualified during 2007. If Mr. Edwards was so cavalier about spending taxpayer money in 2004 that he would shell out $1,250 of the taxpayers' $75 million election subsidy for a single haircut, how could voters seriously consider him for president, one of whose jobs will be to oversee an annual federal budget in excess of $3 trillion? Moreover, what does it say about anybody who would actually pay such a sum for a haircut?

On at least three occasions in 2004, Mr. Edwards had his Beverly Hills hairstylist fly to Atlanta (August), Washington (early October) and Ohio (late October); stay overnight in a hotel; and cut Mr. Edwards' hair. When the editorial page of The Washington Times first questioned the Edwards campaign about the 2004 haircuts, deputy national press secretary Colleen Murray said that staffers from the 2008 campaign combed several boxes of records from 2004. Unable to locate the proverbial "needle in a haystack" that would have revealed that taxpayers had paid for the haircuts, she concluded that Mr. Edwards had paid for them with his own money.

A week ago, after Mr. Edwards took out his bank loan, The Washington Times asked the campaign to forget about looking for "a needle in a haystack" and, instead, search for "the boulder in the bathtub." Surely bank records or credit-card statements from August to November 2004 could be easily accessed with a quick telephone call. The campaign declined to provide any evidence, and taxpayers may draw their own conclusions.

All of this matters.

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