But on a spring Friday in sleepy Adel, Iowa, as Edwards stands surrounded by pale, stern-faced farmers in plaid shirts and modestly coiffed housewives, the hair is looking a little too good. The news that he paid $400 to have it trimmed by a Beverly Hills stylist broke yesterday and now wafts across this makeshift meeting hall in a pizza joint. For the campaign, it's an unwelcome reminder of what people suspect to be Edwards's main weakness: a certain lightness of being that dovetails all too well with that viral YouTube video of the candidate preening for two minutes before a TV appearance. It's especially unfortunate given that the 54-year-old former senator from North Carolina is here to explain his plans for rural America, the things he'll do as president of the United States to make life better for working farmers and farm families. It's the hair versus the message and, at this moment, it's hard to know which will win.
[Read and hear an interview with Edwards's adviser Dave "Mudcat" Saunders on how the Dems can win back the "Bubba vote."]
Edwards paces the small platform, explaining how he'll fight corporate farming, funnel capital to rural schools and businesses, and expand broadband access to out-of-the-way places. The rural South is where he's from, after all—the town of Robbins, North Carolina, population 1,200. In America, he says, "people like me can come from nowhere, the son of a mill worker…and now be running for president of the United States and pay $400 for a haircut!"
The Iowans erupt in laughter, a great gale of relief. "You like that, do you?" Edwards says, grinning. A white-haired 56-year-old named Marilyn, who had noted beforehand that $400 haircuts are "harder for people from the Midwest to understand," turns and gives a furtive thumbs-up. "He's good!" she whispers. Indeed he is. By the time he's updated the crowd on his wife Elizabeth's battle with cancer and uttered his can't-lose, heat-seeking campaign line—"It's time for Americans to be patriotic about something other than war!"—Edwards has won over the room, totally and completely. Asked about the haircut by the Iowa press afterward, Edwards, hand on hip, eyes squinting in the sun, says, "My whole life has been spent standing up for people who have no voice, and I'll do that as long as I'm alive. It's a ridiculous amount of money for a haircut. I'm actually embarrassed by it."
The honesty is disarming, especially since the Beverly Hills stylist Joseph Torrenueva has already said that Edwards is a "longtime client"—it's no accident that he got a $400 haircut; he just got busted. But whatever: Edwards has transformed embarrassing news into a punch line and a moment of plainspoken humanity. For now, the message has won.
With less money and less star power than Democratic front-runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Edwards may look like a long shot to win his party's nomination. That's why he's been putting all his chips on the Iowa caucus, where a primary win in January 2008 could give him enough momentum to push through any possible Super Tuesday scenario on February 5. Again and again, I watch Edwards get thronged by moon-eyed supporters in Iowa—veterans, housewives, students, and union workers moved to goose bumps by his speeches, trying to touch the hem of his suit or look him in the eye with a personal message about Iraq or health care (a look Edwards returns with eyes narrowed earnestly, head cocked slightly to the side). He has by far the most established campaign organization in Iowa of any of the candidates, having first surged to national prominence there in 2004 and made 23 visits since then. By May, he was still number one in the Iowa polls, with 27 percent of Democrats supporting him.
