Mrs. Edwards campaigns in gated community

BEDFORD, N.H. – Elizabeth Edwards said she did not feel it was inappropriate to hold a campaign event within a gated community just one week before her husband is to launch a national initiative on poverty.

On Tuesday afternoon, Edwards spoke to a house party attended by more than 100 people in Bedford, a Manchester suburb that is one of the richest communities in New Hampshire. She is expected to speak at two other house parties later in the day, in Keene and Hopkinton.

“It is really important to have people inside gated communities as well as outside gated communities engaged if we are going to solve problems as huge as poverty in this country,” Edwards said in response to a reporter's question about whether it was an appropriate setting given her husband's anti-poverty drive.

Her husband continues to be dogged over the disclosure that he got two $400 haircuts, and a recent report said one haircut cost over $1,200.

On the stump, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, himself a multimillionaire, quips: “You know, I think John Edwards was right. There are two Americas. There is the America where people pay $400 for a haircut and then there is everybody else."

The Edwards campaign has announced that next week they will launch a nation-wide tour to bring attention to the issue of poverty. The tour will begin in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.