Newest campaign ad from the Edwards campaign that just started running in New Hampshire this week.  See what you think…

Jamison Foser has a great snapshot peek at the coverage that John Edwards has received from the political press — and how it seems eerily familiar to the treatment that Al Gore got in 2000.  From Media Matters:

Marc Ambinder was one of the founders of ABC’s The Note and is a contributing editor to the National Journal’s Hotline newsletter. The Note and the Hotline consist largely of links to and excerpts of political news and commentary by other reporters with ample doses of snark and Rove-worship thrown in. Whatever they may lack in insight and judgment, The Note and the Hotline are at the center of the D.C. political media establishment.

Ambinder, in other words, is a political reporter whose job has largely been to understand the political media.

This week, Marc Ambinder explained why the media has covered John Edwards’ grooming regimen so much and Mitt Romney’s so little:

There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn’t like John Edwards.

Fairly or unfairly, there’s also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards. It’s not so much interested in burying Romney right now — many reporters think he’s the Republican frontrunner.

Now, if reporters dislike a candidate, that’s their business. But when they wage a relentless and petty campaign to “bury” that candidate, that’s our business. All of us.

And we’ve been through this before.

The 2000 election was close enough that any number of things can fairly be described as having made the difference. But what Bob Somerby describes as the media’s “War Against Gore” was undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in Bush’s “victory.” The contempt many political reporters felt for Gore is clear, as is the inaccurate, unfair, and grossly distorted coverage of Gore that decided the campaign. And, again, you needn’t take my word for it: Bob Somerby, Eric Alterman, Eric Boehlert, and others have chronicled the acknowledgements by working journalists of their colleagues’ hate for Gore. Jake Tapper described reporters “hissing” — actually hissing — Gore. Time’s Eric Pooley described an incident in which a roomful of reporters “erupted in a collective jeer” of Gore “like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”

And Joe Scarborough — conservative television host Joe Scarborough; former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough — has said that during the 2000 election, the media “were fairly brutal to Al Gore. … [I]f they had done that to a Republican candidate, I’d be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased.”

Somerby has long argued that one of the reasons the media’s hatred for Gore was able to define the 2000 campaign so completely is that too few people talked about it — and demanded that it stop — at the time.

The relentless coverage of the Edwards’ haircut smacks of an incredible amount of hypocritical schadenfreude from these fake Heathers — since high-priced television news personalities, with their need for Botox-ed and groomed make-up and hair perfection, anti-aging oxygen facials, and such that is a requirement in a business that promotes image over substance relentlessly live those expensive haircut and spa treatments on a weekly basis. To hear the sort of faux populist spin that all of them have tried to put on the haircut nonsense, knowing both the salary requirements and the grooming regimins of these people is appalling enough.

But to hear all of this — and the recent “Hillary has boobs” expose (so to speak) — one notices a big, gaping pattern: why is it that Democratic candidates get the full Heathers treatment, while Hollywood Fred and Make-up Mitt and Rudy Guiliani and his travelling cross-dressing show, and all the other superficial gaffes and goofs get nary a mention?

The double standard has to stop. But it will only do so when we all stand up together and say collectively “enough.” I’m with Jamo — ENOUGH.