Las Vegas — After a crushing loss in Nevada's Democratic caucuses Saturday, presidential candidate John Edwards, who wears a blue tie because it makes him "special" and "different," said Sunday that he hopes "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."

His hair in curlers while sitting in a strip club sipping a Crown & Diet and chatting up an exotic dancer named "Rusty", Edwards said his placing a distant third in the vote, with just 4 percent behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, intimates he is, in fact, a loser.

“I got my butt kicked. That is what happened in Nevada,” the former North Carolina senator said. “Hold on a sec...Suzie, get me another Crown & Diet and can you make change for this $20? Rusty's got two kids at home and is having trouble .... Anyhow, the job for me now is this — I would kind of like to go back to the old Las Vegas saying, though. You know, ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas' ... including the threesomes and some other stuff I'd rather not go into. I hope that turns out to be true in this case.”

Instead of campaigning in Nevada in the days before Saturday’s vote, Edwards focused instead on trimming his haircut -- a haircut that inspired those of 98 percent of men in the Raliegh-Durham, NC-metro area -- as well as stumping in his birth state of South Carolina, where he won the 2004 primary and runs "The John Edwards Midget Emporium" in Columbia, the state's capital.

Pundits are perplexed by Edwards' failures. Despite owning a multi-million dollar home Chapel Hill, NC, and having worked to evict some neighbors he found unfit, according to his diary Edwards remains a regular guy with regular hair, but is running a distant third in the state in most recent surveys behind Obama and Clinton.

Saturday night, after his disappointing Nevada finish, his campaign tried to downplay the importance of results in any one state.

“The nomination won't be decided by win-loss records,” said Edwards’ campaign manager, former Rep. David Bonior.  "It will be won by John's appeal to regular folks. You know, the ones he was working to foreclose on when he was working as a highly paid consultant to a New York mortgage broker over the past four years.”

On Sunday, Edwards continued to sound a cautious theme, saying South Carolina was “important, especially because of the Midget Emporium,” but just one “part of the long process. …We will see how it goes. I need that Crown & Diet and those singles.”