A Republican Who's Taking His Medicine

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All that would sound a lot less convincing coming from a multimillionaire trial lawyer if Edwards didn't do a persuasive job of selling what he also is: the son of a small-town (Robbins, N.C., pop. 970 ) textile-mill worker and a shop owner. Offering his version of the log-cabin legend, Edwards likes to tell about visiting Washington for the first time in 1976 as a law school student with a summer internship at the Securities and Exchange Commission. After climbing aboard a bus, he was humiliated by the driver when he didn't know what to do with his fare. "I had never been on a city bus before," Edwards remembers now. "I was such a hillbilly!" Even so, he was the kind of hillbilly who became one of North Carolina's top trial lawyers, winning huge negligence and malpractice cases against corporations, insurers, doctors and hospitals.

With his Bruce Jenner hair and gummy Donny Osmond grin, Edwards presents a striking contrast to Faircloth, whose jowly awkwardness in the spotlight is part of his appeal--but can also make him seem a throwback to a waning, good-ole-boy era in North Carolina politics. As usual, and for good reason, the Edwards-Faircloth contest is being cast as a battle between rural conservatives and a new North Carolina, the one centered on Charlotte, the state's thriving financial center, and booming Research Triangle Park, a high-tech enclave that encompasses Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

The influx of better-educated, more suburban voters to the new North Carolina has created a political paradox. The state's electorate is becoming more Republican yet less conservative. New voters in Charlotte and Research Triangle Park tend to register Republican but still prefer fiscally responsible pragmatists--even if they sometimes happen to be Democrats--over firebrand ideologues. Faircloth, a successful hog farmer and former Democrat, scores better in the rural east, which is dominated by socially conservative white Democrats who frequently cross party lines to vote for Helms and other G.O.P. culture warriors. Black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats. The result is a state in hold-your-breath political balance: a Democratic Governor, two Republican Senators and six Congressmen from each party.

For years Democrats have believed, or at least hoped, that the emergence of new-style moderate voters would be enough to cost Jesse Helms his seat. Not yet. Now they are hoping that Edwards will be a crossover success, uniting those more moderate suburbanites with a good chunk of the rural conservatives whose background he shares. "I know 'em like the back of my hand," he says. Sensing trouble, Faircloth is hard on the attack, labeling the other guy a money-hungry trial lawyer whose life's work has driven up the cost of health care across the state. At the same time, he is furiously trying to neutralize Edwards' message by co-opting not just HMO reform but also other Democratic issues, such as environmental protection and "saving Social Security." He has good reason to scramble. Not only is Edwards an exceptionally strong opponent but Faircloth's seat may be jinxed. No Senator who has held it has been re-elected since 1968.