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Presidential campaigns spend all sorts of money on all sorts of things. Television advertisements. Polls. Big-time consultants. Coaches for the news media. Chartered airplanes. High-priced Beverly Hill haircuts for the candidate.
Wait, high-priced Beverly Hills haircuts for the candidates?
John Edwards announced Thursday that he was reimbursing his campaign $800 to cover what his aides said was the cost of two haircuts -- yes, you read that correctly -- by a Beverly Hills barber, though, perhaps, the word stylist is more applicable.
A spokesman for the campaign, Eric Schultz, said that Torrenueva Hair Designs of Beverly Hills sent the bill for a haircut in February and a second last month to the Edwards campaign and that the campaign mistakenly paid it.
Schultz said Edwards would reimburse the campaign. He would not say how a haircut could cost $400 or whether it might cover other expenses, too.
The stylist, Joseph Torrenueva, said in an interview that his normal charge was $175 "in my shop" and that the extra fee was to go to where the candidate was, a practice he described as routine among his clients. Beyond that, he said, "I really can't talk about it."
Edwards has presented himself in the Democratic field as an advocate of working-class Americans, lamenting the nation's growing economic disparity.
Edwards was disparaged as "the Breck girl" by Republicans when he ran for president in 2004. More recently, he was captured on camera, waiting for an interview to begin and presumably unaware that he was being taped, fussing with his hair for nearly two minutes.
That clip found its way to YouTube, with the song "I Feel Pretty" playing in the background. Posted on Nov. 8, 2006, it was viewed 289,288 times as of Thursday evening.
When Bill Clinton was president, he once summoned a Los Angeles hair stylist to Air Force One to cut his hair while the plane sat on the tarmac in Los Angeles.
Candidates are finding more gaffes and foibles posted on the Internet. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was captured on camera in South Carolina on Wednesday when he was asked about sending "an air-mail message to Tehran."
"Remember that old Beach Boys song 'Bomb Iran'?" McCain asked and burst out with the first three notes of "Barbara Ann," with slightly different words. "Bomb, bomb, bomb," he sang.
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