Edwards may entice swing voters

WASHINGTON – In his bid for the presidency earlier this year, Sen. John Edwards often arrived at campaign events as John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” blared over the loudspeakers.

Although he had the good looks, expensive haircut, sparkling smile and Southern charm of the successful trial lawyer he once was, this son of mill workers built his candidacy around his small-town roots, telling voters he could relate to the struggles of working-class Americans because he has never forgotten the difficult days of his youth.

His childhood in the mill towns of the Carolinas and Georgia during the segregated 1950s and ‘60s was the foundation for his populist campaign theme that there were “two Americas,” one for the well-off, who enjoy satisfactory health care and good schools and access to government services, another for the poor and underprivileged, who can’t count on any of those things.

That lower middle-class background is part of a compelling life story that combines overwhelming success with devastating tragedy, one that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry hopes will help him win the independent, moderate and swing voters Edwards appealed to when the two men battled each other in the primaries.

“He is very much a candidate built around his own personal experiences,” says Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “He’s not a policy wonk. You can’t say he’s a skilled parliamentarian. His strength arises from his own experiences and skill sets.”

Those skills – persistence, eloquence and a Bill Clinton-like ability to connect with voters – has propelled the meteoric rise of Edwards, 51, a political unknown until his run for the Senate six years ago. Even Kerry took a jab at his limited experience, saying during the primary race: “And people call me ambitious?”

But while Edwards was a political nonentity until 1998 – he hadn’t even voted in some local elections – he quickly made a name for himself as the junior senator from North Carolina. By 2000 he was on Al Gore’s short list of prospective running mates.

Upon the birth in 1953 of their first child, Johnny, in Seneca, S.C., Bobbie and Wallace Edwards had to borrow $50 to pay the hospital bill. The parents moved among mill towns in the South before settling in Robbins, N.C., a small rural community in the Piedmont where Johnny went to public school.

The first person in his family to attend college, Edwards went to North Carolina State University and enrolled in textile studies. But rather than take on his father’s trade, he chose law school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. There he met a fellow law student, Elizabeth Anania, the daughter of a Navy pilot. They married in 1977, soon after graduation.

After starting their careers in Nashville, the two lawyers returned to North Carolina where Edwards began his work as a personal injury lawyer, representing people who had been injured, often children, and winning record judgments.

With charisma and a competitive streak that even his opponents admired, Edwards became a multimillionaire, trying dozens of personal injury cases, including one in 1997 in which he won $25 million for a 5-year-old girl injured after getting stuck in the drain of a wading pool. A few months later, he won a $23 million judgment for the parents of a baby born with brain damage.

He often took enormous gambles, turning down giant settlement offers in the belief that the jury would return even more generous awards.

“Self-doubt is not one of his weaknesses,” says Guillory.

Along with amassing his own personal fortune – which North Carolina Lawyers Weekly reported at $38 million – Edwards honed courtroom skills that served him well when he turned his sights on elective office.

His legal career earned him the support of fellow trial lawyers, who largely underwrote his presidential campaign. They contributed most of the $11.6 million he received from the legal profession, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But trial lawyers are also considered the nemesis of corporate America, which came to view him with skepticism if not disdain.

Edwards’ entry into politics in 1998 was abrupt and a bit of a gamble, too, since he financed his bid to oust Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth with more than $6 million of his own money. And it came on the heels of a life-altering experience – the 1996 death of his 16-year-old son, Wade, in a car accident.

Edwards stopped working and stayed at home with his wife and their daughter, Catharine. The couple established an after-school program, a scholarship and nonprofit foundation in Wade’s name – and reassessed their lives.

Elizabeth Edwards gave up her career, and in her late 40s and early 50s, with the help of fertility drugs, had two more children, Emma Claire and Jack. Edwards turned to politics, something he’d been thinking about before the tragedy.

Edwards beat Faircloth in 1998, winning 51 percent of the vote.

In the Senate, the new lawmaker won praise for helping to win Senate passage of a Patients Bill of Rights, which would have allowed patients to sue their HMOs among other things, although the bill stalled in the House.