John Edwards Bets the Farm

(4 of 5)
One thing the Edwards campaign has going for it now is a focused, energized candidate. That hasn't always been the case. At campaign events earlier this year, some Edwards staffers noticed that their man seemed distracted, perhaps because of his wife's illness. That changed as a result of the three days in mid-July that he devoted to his "poverty tour," an eight-state trip meant to shine a light on some of the neediest places in the country.

The tour got off to an unimpressive start. In New Orleans, where it began, Edwards moved through a series of rushed photo ops that gave him little time to interact with people or show off the substance of his antipoverty proposals, about which he knows plenty. (In 2005 he became founding director of a poverty think tank at UNC-Chapel Hill, and since then he has visited more than 100 antipoverty programs.) As his tour moved up the Mississippi Delta, he met people enduring dreadful conditions with remarkable fortitude, and he slowly came alive.

But the poverty was more compelling than the candidate. He didn't go in for big, Bill Clinton-style shows of emotion; he simply interviewed people and let them tell their stories. At the Mount Levi Full Gospel Baptist Church in Canton, Miss., he spoke with poultry workers who live in a trailer park beside the chicken plant, as many as 10 or 12 stuffed into a single trailer with two beds. In West Helena, Ark., he met with home-health-care workers who earn little more than minimum wage from the state department of health—which won't let them work more than 20 hours a week, they say, because it would then have to give them health benefits. In a powerful moment, Edwards asked the workers how much they're paid to change geriatric diapers and salve bedsores. Hesitantly at first, then with pride and defiance, the numbers came out: "$6.30 an hour," said one woman; "$7.75," said the next; "$7.25." No one was making more than $8.63 an hour—less than $175 a week.

On Cotton Street in Marks, Miss., not so much a town as a sprinkle of cottages baking in the sun, Edwards retraced the steps of Martin Luther King Jr., who was so moved by what he saw there in 1968 that he decided to launch the Poor People's March on Washington from Marks. Sammie Mae Henley lived on Cotton Street in 1968 and still lives there today, surviving on a $620 a month Social Security check, sitting on the plywood porch of the same tumbledown shack that King visited 39 years ago. She is 80, with gunmetal-gray hair pulled back in a bun and eyes that are warm and rheumy, blinking at the politician and the reporters. "You are not 80 years old!" Edwards hollered at her. "You are looking good, I'm telling you!" She eyed him skeptically, and soon he and the media horde moved on. I asked her if a visit like this did any good.

Her son answered first. "It got them to fix the potholes in the street this morning," said Leroy Jones, 62. Is that it? "Well, I think it's a good sign," Henley said finally. "This place is looking up." Another man on the porch, James Figgs, said he was moved by Edwards' visit but he'll probably vote for Obama.

On the last day of the poverty tour, Edwards finally caught fire. It happened at the Wise County Fairgrounds in the mountains of southwestern Virginia, where he was interviewing health advocates and patients. Everybody said their bit except for one man—slim as a stick, with thick brown hair combed straight back from a well-worn face that was anchored by a salt-and-pepper goatee. He didn't say a word until Edwards noticed him. He reminded the candidate of men who'd worked in the mills with his father. "I'd like to hear from you," Edwards said.

And so James Lowe started talking, something he couldn't do until a year ago. He is 51, a disabled coal miner from the hollows of eastern Kentucky, and he was born with a severe cleft palate. When he tried to talk as a boy, he couldn't make himself understood, so after a while he stopped trying. Lowe dropped out of school in the fifth grade, followed his father into the mines and still couldn't afford treatment. Then he was partially paralyzed in a mining accident. That didn't leave him many options.

Lowe lived a mute and, by his own account, diminished life for five decades in all before he finally got a break last year. At the Wise Fairgrounds, where a volunteer group called the Rural Area Medical Health Expedition once a year provides free medical and dental treatment to all comers, dentists referred him to someone who could help. Now he has a prosthesis that enables him to speak pretty well. And so here he was on a Wednesday morning in July, back at the fairground because he wanted to say thanks. "We grew up hard, had nothing," he said. "But what these people done for me made me feel like a different person."

Lowe seemed startled when Edwards got angry on his behalf. "We have to do something about this! This is not O.K.!" the candidate said. "How can we allow this to happen, that James had to live 50 years without treatment? Let me tell you, as long as I am alive and breathing, I'm going to do something about it." He told Lowe's story at every event for the rest of the day, and he hasn't stopped since.

Edwards makes less frequent mention these days, however, of his goal of eliminating poverty within 30 years. He has taken the passions that were stirred in him by the poverty tour and moved them up the economic ladder. Rallying people to help the have-nots has given way to rallying people to help themselves. That's smart—but not especially transformational—politics.