Seeking to regain his political footing, White House hopeful John Edwards is pursuing a road less traveled: a three-day, eight-state tour through pockets of urban and rural poverty.
Beginning Sunday night in New Orleans and ending Wednesday in Appalachian Kentucky, the former North Carolina senator will reinvigorate an old campaign theme and test an even older notion: that talking about poor people is a politically losing proposition.
The poverty rate in America has stayed fairly constant since the late 1960s. But polls show that the issue of poverty and homelessness consistently ranks low among voters' priorities. The discussion has become so fraught with moral and racial overtones that presidential contenders often find it best to say little or nothing.
But Edwards insists that "people do care" about those less fortunate and believe government has a role, even a responsibility, to help those who cannot help themselves. They just have to be asked.
"I think the best measure is not a poll," the Democrat said Thursday, "but the way Americans responded when a hurricane hit New Orleans. They made contributions. They volunteered."
Skepticism is widespread. "To the extent that Edwards can link the poverty issue to a wider problem that the middle class can associate itself with, then he may be able to get some traction," said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a domestic policy advisor during President Clinton's first term. "If it's simply a question of the bottom 10% of the population, then he will not."
Ben Tulchin, whose firm conducts polling for Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, another Democratic presidential contender, put it this way: "It's a nice story, the poverty thing. But at some time, voters are going to say, 'What's in it for me?' "
For some Democratic primary voters -- Edwards' target audience -- there is a tinge of nostalgia.
The tour was conspicuously modeled after past pilgrimages, stopping in Marks, Miss., where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began his 1968 Poor People's March on Washington, and finishing at the Floyd County Courthouse in Prestonsburg, Ky., where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy ended his iconic anti-poverty tour the same year.
But the parallels only go so far.
