Campaign '04: Campaign Journal: The Southern-Fried Twins

Like many southerners who move away, Wesley Clark of Arkansas and John Edwards of North Carolina now wear their Southernness gaudily, as though they must prove its authenticity. For them, the South seems not so much a home as a talisman to ward off Northeasterners and liberals, Dukakises and--they hope--Kerrys.

Of the 12 states holding Democratic contests in early February, only four are in the South. But Edwards and Clark know their Southernness makes a larger argument before even a single drawled word is spoken: We are red-state guys; we can bring the fight to Republican territory. As Edwards puts it, "I can beat Bush in the West, the Midwest, the East and"--at this point he twangs his voice to sound approximately like Gomer Pyle--"talkin' lahk this--in the Sowth!"

Front runner John Kerry was caught last week saying his chances of winning the South are slim. "Everyone always makes the mistake of looking South," he told a Dartmouth College crowd, in a clip Karl Rove surely downloaded for future use. "Al Gore proved he could have been President of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own." But Gore didn't become President. And Kerry didn't mention Edwards' favorite bit of presidential trivia: no Democrat has been elected without winning at least five Southern states. "What I give [Democrats] is a candidate who can win everywhere in America," Edwards said last week.

Clark has a similar pitch. In his stump speech, quartered into Southern-friendly themes--patriotism, faith, family, leadership--he mentions Arkansas as many as a dozen times. He does not say that after he graduated from Little Rock's Hall High School, he moved away--for 34 years.

But Clark has plenty of Southern tales. He told me about blasting cans in a crick--"You'd throw the beer can and take the pistol, and bang"--and, having grown up in Arkansas myself, I recounted freezing duck hunts on the Cache River. But Clark trumped me. He launched into a "Mama-thon"--how "beautiful" she was, how "capable." There was even a Faulknerian touch. "She wasn't good with babies, let's put it that way," he said of the late Veneta Clark, who became a working mother after Clark's dad died of a heart attack when he was 3. "I remember one time, when I was 2 or 3 years old--and I can still remember, because it was painful--my mother stuck a finger in my eye, trying to change my diaper ... My mother just--there was no money," he said, choking up. I'm not sure if Clark is a good presidential candidate, but he is a great candidate for therapy.

But Southernness not only stands for moderate, red-state politics. It also carries a cultural meaning, one that Clark hints at with his sad Mama tales: We're average people. In Edwards' new book, Four Trials, people are never just people--they are always "regular people" or "decent people" or folks with "good common sense."

Edwards' pitch to voters--that there are two Americas, "one for those who have everything they need and another for everybody else, folks who struggle every day just to get by"--works only if he can claim to know what it's like to live in the latter nation. And he can. His father Wallace, who couldn't afford college, worked in a string of mills across the South. (He eventually became a manager, something his son doesn't mention in his stump speech.)