Edwards, the son of a millworker, now courts them

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Senator John Edwards of North Carolina acknowledges that if he doesn't win South Carolina Tuesday his bid for the White House will be in serious trouble.

Edwards's political fate may rest on support from working-class white voters living in South Carolina's textile mill communities -- the "lint heads" and "wool hats," as they are called, who have been hard hit by economic changes.

Foreign competition has ravaged the South Carolina textile industry in recent years, shuttering once thriving mills and decimating once vibrant towns. Massive brick mills sit silent throughout parts of this state; huge spools of unprocessed cotton lie untouched.

Much has been made of black voters in this state. They are likely to cast 40 percent of South Carolina's Feb. 3 Democratic primary votes. But that population appears split between Edwards, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, who recently won support from the state's preeminent black politician, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who enjoys a robust following here.

"I think working-class whites are his only hope," said Clemson University political scientist Stephen H. Wainscott. "If he could hit that working-class group, he could make a lot of headway."

As Edwards points out with precision regularity on the campaign trail these days, he was born among South Carolina's millworkers in Seneca, a small town in the heart of this economically struggling region.

A South Carolina poll released yesterday had Edwards and Kerry in a statistical dead heat, though more than a quarter of voters surveyed were undecided. The raw number of the Zogby survey gave Edwards a one-point edge.

"Where I come from, if you win a basketball game 80 to 79, it counts," said Edwards at a campaign stop in Florence yesterday.

Another poll by CBS News found Edwards leading Kerry in the state 30 to 18 percent.

Despite his front-runner status, Kerry may have some trouble finding traction in the textile belt here. Even among Democrats, liberal Northeasterners are something of an anathema. "Kennedy" is a local political epithet, and Kerry has gotten high-visibility support from Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the personification of intrusive, condescending liberalism for many here.

"His association with the Kennedy clan is hard for some to swallow," said Wainscott. "Kennedy is something of a liberal poltergeist here."

Edwards, meanwhile, has a clear connection to this area: His father worked in a textile mill and he grew up in mill communities around the region. In fact, his populist-tinged message -- his stump speech decries "two Americas" divided by class -- was designed with disaffected blue-collar workers in mind.

In the past decade, South Carolina has lost about 60,000 textile and apparel jobs, according to the US Labor Department. In the Upstate region where Edwards was born, the core of the textile belt, the industry has cut its workforce in half over the last decade, now employing about 40,000 workers. Meanwhile, 128,000 South Carolinians are unemployed, many of them former mill workers.

Edwards has been airing a television ad in which he asks: "Did you know we're in an economic recovery right now? What they call a jobless economic recovery. Where I grew up, if you don't have a job, you don't have a recovery."

But despite his roots, Edwards's success as trial lawyer might work against him. At a forum of liberal activists in Columbia yesterday, when a moderator questioned his populist credentials given that he owns two mansions, some in the crowd applauded and hooted in agreement.

"The life that I live is the dream that's been shut off from millions of Americans," said Edwards. As he continued with details from his Southern upbringing, the moderator announced time was up.

"No, you've got to let me answer this," Edwards shot back, to applause. "I will never forget where I came from and you can take that to the bank." The crowd thundered.

South Carolina state Democratic Party chairman Joe Irwin, who is not backing any candidate, said competition for the disaffected blue-collar vote has been fierce in recent days.

"I think all of them have gone after that group pretty hard," he said.

Edwards, he said, had a natural connection: "It's almost the absolute core of what he's about."

Edwards yesterday pointed out that he was not in the Senate when the North American Free Trade Agreement -- the subject of much textile worker ire -- was passed, and that he campaigned against it in his 1998 Senate race. He proposes renegotiating it to include provisions requiring higher labor standards among trading partners. Edwards says he would continue textile quotas for Chinese imports until China respects international trade agreements.

Kerry meanwhile voted for NAFTA, and has promised to add worker protections to future trade treaties. But in speeches he also warns that jobs will not likely return en masse to the decimated textile industry here.

"He speaks about it in a different way than Edwards, in a more general way," said Irwin. "He's taken a more careful approach."

Raja Mishra can be reached at rmishra@globe.com.