Breck Girl Hits WaPo Fashion Page

The Silky Pony, a/k/a The Breck Girl, comes off looking more like a diva than a candidate for President.

This clown babbles on about Two Americas wherever he goes. Apparently there are Two Americas. One for blowdried blowhards who gets $400 haircuts, spa treatments and live in 28,000 square foot estates while the rest of us schlubs manage with $11 haircuts and modest homes.

Amid the nearly $3.3 million in travel costs, equipment rental fees and salaries listed on presidential candidate John Edwards's most recent campaign finance filing, a few expenses stand out. They are the ones incurred at Designworks Salon in Dubuque, Iowa, Torrenueva Hair Designs in Beverly Hills, Calif., and the Pink Sapphire salon and spa in Manchester, N.H.

The campaign paid $800 for two haircuts from the Torrenueva salon. Designworks provided $248 worth of camera-ready makeup. And Pink Sapphire was called on two occasions for Edwards's makeup needs at $150 and $75 a visit. Together they account for $1,273 worth of professional grooming, from trims to foundation.

According to the campaign, the haircuts should have been on Edwards's personal account and so he will make good on the $800. The makeup applications will remain on the campaign's tab.

While vanity is as common to the human condition as failing to learn from past missteps, one would think that a candidate who was lambasted in 2003 by a Bush loyalist as a "Breck girl" would exercise greater caution on matters related to his appearance. The anonymous critic, quoted in the New York Times, used the admiring attention paid to Edwards's thick mop of chocolate brown hair as a symbol of a candidate some painted as slick, shallow and lightweight.

That "Bush loyalist" I believe was Rush Limbaugh, though he may not have been the first to coin the phrase. Whatever the case, once you're being ridiculed on the WaPo fashion page, you're not going to be taken seriously.

But there is a line between grooming and primping. Brushing your teeth is grooming. Giving yourself a big Chiclet smile with veneers is primping. Having an adept barber come around to the hotel to give a busy candidate a trim is grooming. Getting the owner of an expensive Beverly Hills salon to come over, knowing full well that the cost is going to be 10 times what the average Joe is likely to pay for a haircut . . . that's a Breck girl move.

Watch this clip from 2004 when Edwards personally created a hole in the ozone layer while being sandblasted with hairspray.

It won't be long until he cries on the campaign trail after accidentally getting dirt under his fingernails during a photo op.

What a buffoon.