John Edwards’ hairstylist speaks out:

Joseph Torrenueva … Beverly Hills hairstylist, a Democrat, said he hit it off with then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina at a meeting in Los Angeles that brought several fashion experts together to advise the candidate on his appearance. Since then, Torrenueva has cut Edwards’s hair at least 16 times.

At first, the haircuts were free. But because Torrenueva often had to fly somewhere on the campaign trail to meet his client, he began charging $300 to $500 for each cut, plus the cost of airfare and hotels when he had to travel outside California.

Torrenueva said one haircut during the 2004 presidential race cost $1,250 because he traveled to Atlanta and lost two days of work.

One thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars. I have had cars that cost less than that. But why is this coming out now?

Because of how Edwards, his wife, and his campaign treated the brouhaha over the $400 cuts:

Edwards said that he was embarrassed by the cost and that he “didn’t know it would be that expensive,” suggesting the haircuts were some kind of aberration given by “that guy” his staff had arranged. His wife, Elizabeth, made lots of jokes at her husband’s expense and the campaign wished the whole issue would go away….

In the days after the $400 haircut first caused a stir, Torrenueva did not give many details about his client to reporters who called or came by his Beverly Hills salon. But Torrenueva says he was hurt by Edwards’s response to all the flap.

“I’m disappointed and I do feel bad. If I know someone, I’m not going to say I don’t know them,” he said. “When he called me ‘that guy,’ that hit my ears. It hurt.” He paused and then added, “I still like him. . . . I don’t want to hurt him.”

A couple of other reactions I had to this Washington Post story:

“He has nice hair,” the stylist said of Edwards in an interview. “I try to make the man handsome, strong, more mature and these are the things, as an expert, that’s what we do.”

It is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics that as Edwards has campaigned for president, vice president and now president again, his hair seems to have attracted as much attention as, say, his position on health care.

First, if you’re spending over a thousand dollars on a haircut from a guy at the Pink Sapphire and you think that’s going to make you look manly, you’re gullible enough to think socialized medicine will improve healthcare, the minimum wage will solve poverty, and socialism will improve the economy.

Second, to play my colleague Mitch Kokai’s game of Says Who? for a second, who says that attention paid to Edwards’ hair spending is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics? What about commentary on John Edwards’ priorities or undue attention to image? What about commentary on Americans’ ability to detect a phony? If we’re to infer “commentary” from Candidate Twelve-Hundred-Haircut, perhaps we could look a little further than blaming it on America?