Ouch

Alex Forshaw on Edwards:

Edwards continues to fade. The Edwards and Obama campaigns released dueling New Hampshire ads; Gore lost steam, yet Edwards lost significant support as well. At the same time, Edwards has embarked on a strangely irrelevant "poverty tour" through some of the poorest parts of America. (Haircut... haircut...)

Unfortunately for Obama, many Edwards supporters have been driven to spluttering outrage at the relentless "narrative" of the "Edwards haircut," and how the "right-wing hate machine" is "manipulating" Edwards' public image. Edwards supporters fail to understand that, to 90% of the people pushing this narrative, it is not about highlighting Edwards' haircuts, $500,000 Fortress internship, and Chapel Hill palace because they are "out to get him" and stop his redistributionist agenda. It's about using simplistic data points to reveal -- not mischaracterize -- a profoundly hypocritical political opportunist who has portrayed his every repositioning as a spontaneous "Damascus moment," which coincidentally matched a concurrent tectonic shift in the political landscape. Iraq, bankruptcy reform, free trade, taxes, the larger anti-salafist war: you name it, and Edwards has had at least two positions on it.