Yet not so great in light of the fact that, since May, there have been nearly four times—387—the number of references to The Coif Heard Round the World: Edwards’s series of expensive haircuts that had the media all abuzz, if you will, back in April and, since then, “just won’t stay out of the news.” (The number of stories that mention Edwards’s hair jumps to 455 when the search is expanded to April 17, the day the so-called story broke.) “Looking pretty is costing John Edwards’ presidential campaign a lot of pennies,” scoffed the AP, citing two $400 haircuts “by celebrity stylist Joseph Torrenueva of Beverly Hills” and trips to a “trendy spa in Dubuque, Iowa” and a New Hampshire “‘boutique for the mind, body and face’… that caters mostly to women.”

If there was any story to be found in all this, it was certainly not Edwards’s “beautiful and silkily wonderful hair” (thanks for that one, Pajamas Media), but rather the fact that the candidate paid for its styling out of campaign funds and was naïve enough to report the expenditures to the FEC (which many candidates simply don’t—or, if they do, they conveniently classify those costs as “media production expenses”). But, you know, snooze. So, instead, we got widespread vilification of 2004’s “Breck girl” for being too much of a “political pretty boy.” Jim Miklaszewski, NBC’s chief Pentagon correspondent, called Edwards a “loser” not for the cut itself, but for defending it (“the unkindest cut of all,” Shakespeare might say). An only slightly more charitable Andrea Mitchell, pundit-ing with Chris Matthews, managed at once to reduce and aggrandize Haircutgate by framing it as an Authenticity Thing:

MATTHEWS: You guys jumped around for a week about poor, what’s his name, John Edwards’ haircut, you know. Cosmetics are a part of this game.

MITCHELL: That wasn’t cosmetics.

MATTHEWS: What was that then?

MITCHELL: That was authenticity.

A $400 haircut is ridiculous, sure—but does it really get down to authenticity itself? Might it be a tad hypocritical of the media to insist on the beauty-pageantification of politics, and then vilify a candidate for playing by the rules they set? And is it really fair to suggest, as Maureen Dowd did, that Torrenueva’s infamous shears have snipped Edwards’s presidential chances as surely as they did his famous tresses? (And not to be, well, snippy, but Edwards’s fellow tax-bracketeer, Mitt Romney, spent $300 on makeup this May. How much press coverage did that get?)

One has to wonder where all this seemingly myopic antipathy is coming from. Perhaps it’s a matter of history—an acknowledgment that, while Clinton and Obama both offer monumental Firsts in their candidacies, an Edwards nomination would be business as usual. Or perhaps it’s that Edwards, running for the second time, already had his Life Story told in back in ‘04—and the necessity of keeping stories fresh has made reporters resort to finding their requisite newness in the negative. Or perhaps the media have something personal at stake in vilifying Edwards and making him, as The Washington Post had it, “unusually susceptible to mockery.” After all, the MSM have faced their own accusations of vanity/hypocrisy/elitism; indicting the self-styledly populist candidate for not being populist enough has the convenient consequence of aligning the press with the working man—and, thus, away from The Man.

Or maybe—the simplest answer—Edwards really is the hypocritical, power-hungry creep many in the media are suggesting he is. That could be; it wouldn’t be the first time such a character has run for president. And there might be something to the Fortress story. But the press has been scrawling its “Dear John” letter long before that story broke, and it’s still unclear exactly why: None of Edwards’s missteps, which are inevitable in campaigns that marry political pageantry and media scrutiny, seems so far to have warranted the vitriol he’s received. If the fling with Edwards is over, we in the media need to make it clear—not implicitly, but explicitly—why we’re calling for the breakup. And if there’s no real evidence of Edwards’s presidential unfitness, then we need to stop suggesting it. Otherwise, the whole “it’s not you, it’s me” line might have some truth to it: the problem isn’t Edwards. It’s us.

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