By Donald Kaul
via minutemanmedia.org
It happens at least once every presidential campaign. A candidate will accidentally blurt out the truth or do something silly that his enemies and the press can use against him and…they use it. Once that happens, it is “adios chump” for the hapless candidate, though he often stumbles on, bravely.
I think that’s what has just happened to John Edwards. The other week, it was revealed that Edwards, who has been labeled “the Breck Girl” by opponents jealous of his good looks, had gotten a couple of haircuts in Los Angeles this year.
They cost $400. Each.
Now Ronald Reagan may have been able to get away with that because he was a Republican, a movie star and he campaigned on a platform of “Let the rich be rich.”
But Edwards is a Democrat and one, moreover, who campaigns as an advocate of the poor. Theoretically, there is no reason a champion of the poor can’t also get $400 haircuts but it isn’t the kind of thing you want to brag about at the soup kitchen. Did Mother Teresa get her nails done at Elizabeth Arden?
From now on, every time he lets his heart bleed a little for the poor, a little cartoon balloon will appear above his head reading “$400 haircut.”
As I said, this sort of thing happens in every election. I’m old enough to remember 1964 when Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, said:
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
Which may sound pretty tame now in these dark days when torture and preemptive war are presented as legitimates acts of statecraft but back in the day it was enough to stamp Goldwater as a certifiable right wing nut, not to be trusted with his thumb on the Doomsday Machine. He was overwhelmed by President Lyndon Johnson in the election that fall. (If Goldwater were in the Senate today he’d be considered a Libertarian-leaning, moderate Republican.)
Four years later, Michigan Republican Gov. George (father of Mitt) Romney walked the plank. During the primaries, he explained his early support of the Vietnam War (later withdrawn) by saying:
“When I came back from Vietnam I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”
Which was true of most Americans (including members of the press) at the time, but from that moment on he became the brainwashed candidate, an intellectual lightweight. He came in sixth at the Republican convention that year.
In 1972, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. During the New Hampshire primary, the “Manchester Union-Leader” (a right-wing rag you wouldn’t use to line your birdcage, if you liked the bird) launched a scurrilous attack on Muskie’s wife, saying that she drank excessively and used foul language.
Muskie, a volatile man, went to Manchester and denounced the report during a snowstorm in front of the paper. David Broder, a highly respected journalist, reported that Muskie had broken into tears during his speech. Muskie always claimed it was melted flakes from the falling snow. A lot of good it did him. He was branded forever as the too-emotional candidate who cried in public. He lost to George McGovern who got buried by Richard Nixon who…oh, you know the rest.
Subsequently we were treated to a revelation that President Jimmy Carter, a former nuclear submarine commander, was a wimp because he wacked an apparently rabid rabbit with an oar while boating. This became the “killer rabbit” incident, although I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with a rabid forest animal. Invite it into your boat?
Then there was Mike Dukakis, trying to out-man Reagan by getting a ride in tank with his grinning, helmeted head sticking out of the top. He merely looked ridiculous and ridiculous he remained during the campaign.
It happens all of the time and it will happen again. And the more trivial the moment, the greater its impact.
Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.
