Southerner's strategy
More than any other presidential candidate this year, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina trumpets his personal history: born the son of a mill worker, taught by his parents to value hard work, and inculcated as a young man with the values of the Great Society.
Edwards's life story is the centerpiece of his campaign, much as it was for his occasional adviser, "the man from Hope," Bill Clinton, who has urged Edwards to sell himself to Americans with an optimistic, forward-looking political message undergirded by his years of toil and success.
The logic of this strategy is clear. When Edwards talks to voters about his high-school-educated parents, or about growing up white and lower middle class in the segregated South of the 1950s and '60s, many voters tend to sit up and listen, seeing a human being in a politician's mantle. But when he delves into his political resume, which is among the slimmest of the Democratic contenders, save the Rev. Al Sharpton, many voters come away saying that the boyish-looking, first-term senator seems a bit underprepared for the presidency but would make a terrific vice president.
Edwards was born in Seneca, S.C., in June 1953 to Bobbie and Wallace Edwards, who borrowed $50 to bring him home because they couldn't afford the doctor's bills. The young family was a ward of a particular master: the local mill, which built a village, then rented out homes and made the rules. As a skinny youth with soft features, Edwards was a target for bigger boys and got into numerous fistfights during his school days. Over time, he won more than he lost.
Edwards's family lived in several mill towns in South Carolina and Georgia. It was in Georgia that the young Edwards first came eye to eye with an avowed racist: his sixth-grade teacher, who quit his job rather than see the school where he taught become integrated. About a year later, when Edwards was 12, the family settled for good in Robbins, N.C., a small, rural community dominated by a textile mill where Wallace Edwards won a series of promotions.
Edwards himself studied textile science at North Carolina State University, but rather than join his father in the industry, he pursued a childhood interest in social justice and enrolled at the University of North Carolina law school in Chapel Hill. (He also received a high lottery number for the Vietnam War draft and was never called to serve.) He excelled in his studies and grew close to a star student and debater, Elizabeth Anania, who shared his glass-half-full view of life despite their student penury. They married in 1977, after taking the bar exam, with her mother footing the bill for a one-night honeymoon.
Beyond mentioning to Elizabeth once that he might run for office someday, Edwards says he rarely looked beyond his family's personal and professional satisfaction. The couple had a son, Wade, in 1979, and a daughter, Cate, in 1982. At work, meanwhile, Edwards gained recognition -- and earned millions of dollars -- as a trial lawyer in personal-injury cases. What many friends saw as Edwards's golden life was shattered in April 1996, when 16-year-old Wade was killed in a car accident. Edwards and his wife halted everything; he eventually returned to the courtroom, but no longer jogged through the cemetery where they buried Wade, to whom Edwards says he was "attached at the breastbone."
The next year, national Democrats began reaching out to Edwards for a possible run against Senator Lauch Faircloth, a Republican. Democratic leaders were attracted to Edwards's intelligence and his ability to put personal funds into his own campaign. Edwards, 45 at the time, offered himself to voters as a generational contrast to the 70-year-old Faircloth and emerged victorious, winning 51 percent of the vote.
In his five years in the Senate, Edwards helped oversee depositions during the Clinton impeachment trial and was instrumental in drafting the patients' bill of rights. He made Al Gore's vice presidential short list in 2000, and friends who talked to him at that time say that he envisioned himself in the White House someday.
After a string of glowing media reports, Edwards decided to run for president. His early fund-raising was impressive, but he was eclipsed as the Democrats' fresh face by Howard Dean last spring, then Wesley K. Clark in the fall. In recent weeks, voters have been giving him a second look.
Edwards is positioning himself as a centrist Democrat in Clinton's mold, backing a multilateral approach to foreign policy. Although he voted to authorize military action in Iraq, he has been critical of the war. He has also offered ambitious spending plans to provide health insurance to all children and to pay for the first year of public-college tuition for students who work.
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com. 