The John Edwards haircut keeps getting resurrected, like a creature from a bad horror movie. The Republicans unearthed it most recently in their second debate, when former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, “We’ve had a Congress that’s spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.” Republicans have been focusing on symbolic character attacks since Nixon branded George McGovern, who’d flown 35 B-24 bomber missions in World War II, “the candidate of acid, amnesty and abortion.” If the attacks aren’t adequately answered, too often they work.

Think about John Kerry’s refusal to answer the Swift Boaters until far too late. Together with Kerry’s more general distancing himself from his Vietnam-era protests (and endless mixed messages on the Iraq War) it made a key difference in the election. The Edwards haircut is trivial, but needs to be dealt with because it speaks to a long-cultivated narrative that anyone with money who tries to make this country more equitable must ultimately be a hypocrite. (Those without money are dismissed as marginal whiners.) “I can’t trust anyone who gets a $400 haircut and then says they’re for ordinary Americans,” a fellow commercial fisherman told my oldest friend last week, shutting off any discussion before it began.

I heard John Edwards in person a couple weeks after the haircut story broke. After leading with the need for the Senate to force a prompt withdrawal from Iraq, he spoke eloquently about poverty and global warming, health care, disappearing pensions, and how to build a more just economy. He spent an hour carefully listening and responding to questioners from the floor. Over the past few years, none of the major candidates have taken stronger or more passionate stands. I’d already donated to his campaign, but went home and donated some more.

It’s going to take strong stands like those of Edwards to overcome the manufactured distractions and distortions—and the media’s propensity to make them their lead stories. You can’t do it with mealy-mouthed platitudes. But so long as Republicans and a compliant media keep bringing up the haircut, Edwards also needs to do more to neutralize the incident’s power as a symbol to be used against him.

Laughing helps. As Edwards explained in a North Carolina Town Hall meeting, the haircut was scheduled by staff, squeezed in between the nonstop timetables of campaigning. “I knew it would be expensive now, I don’t want to mislead—when a haircut guy comes to your hotel to do your hair it’s not going to be cheap.”

So long as prominent Republicans continue to use the image, Edwards needs both to neutralize the incident as much as possible, both directly and with the help of others willing to speak out. That means continuing to publicly laugh at it, and at himself. It also means talking about how it fits the larger patterns of Republican character attacks and our more general cultural focus on the politics of personality over discussion of what our prospective leaders might actually stand for. He needs to make clear that those making such issues their focus do so because they have no vision to get this country out of the disasters their policies have helped create. Edwards needs to get that response out in the media, on the web, and in every possible venue.

In a culture that wasn’t so distracted to death, and where men like Karl Rove weren’t constantly creating smokescreens and lies, incidents like the Edwards haircut would be irrelevant. But until American voters unequivocally reject such manufactured distractions, candidates can’t prevail against these kinds of attacks by simply ignoring them. They need to have an organized team in place to help them respond as clearly, comprehensively, and saliently as possible, while highlighting the bankruptcy of the politics represented by those who would promote them. Only then will they have a chance to address the real issues that we face.

Paul Rogat Loeb (www.paulloeb.org) is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time.