WP, The Front-Runners: John Edwards, Beyond the Run of the Mill

[DeepModem Mom]

THE FRONT-RUNNERS: Understanding the leading Presidential candidates
HOW HE GOT HERE
Beyond the Run of the Mill
By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 11, 2007; Page A08


Undated black-and-white photo showing Sen. John Edwards, bottom right, and his sister Kathy sitting for a portrait with his parents Bobbie and Wallace. (AP)

...."I saw my father, one of the finest people I've ever known, struggle because he didn't have a college education," Edwards says. "To me, he was a perfect example of somebody who was strong and good and worked incredibly hard, but they were bumping their head against the ceiling."

Of all the 2008 presidential candidates, Edwards talks the most about where he came from: the working-class mill towns of the Carolinas and Georgia. Always describing himself as "the son of a millworker," he tells stories of family hardships -- the one about his father having to borrow $50, at 100 percent interest, to bring his newborn son home from the hospital is a favorite -- and says he identifies with "the little guy." But he does so with such glibness, and frequency, and it contrasts so greatly with who he is today -- a polished former trial lawyer worth millions -- that the truth of his biography is sometimes lost. These days, Edwards's $400 haircuts and $6 million house garner the lion's share of attention, and he is testimony to the fact that youthful good looks aren't necessarily a political asset.

In an interview, Edwards dismisses the accusations of phoniness as "just politics." The rich-lawyer label rankles a little, though not enough for him to abandon the trappings that he has worked so hard to obtain. "What I want to say to people is 'Well, if I hadn't been successful, would that make me better qualified to be president?' " he asks. On the campaign trail, however, he doesn't mind poking fun at himself. "My parents actually brought me home to a little house in Seneca, South Carolina," he told an appreciative crowd in last month in Bow, N.H. "Today, as many of you have heard, I don't live in a little house."

But there is another John Edwards, the one who tooled around tiny Robbins, N.C., in a red Plymouth Duster as a teenager, who took the greasiest summer jobs at the mill to earn money for college, who still often forces his staff to eat at Cracker Barrel because it reminds him oh-so-faintly of the big meals his mother used to cook. "You can never forget where you came from," he says more than once, and friends from the old days insist he is, at his core, still one of them. "I've known that man over 40 years, and he's the real deal," says the Rev. John L. Frye Jr., pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, N.C., and one of Edwards's best boyhood friends. "I don't hear him saying anything different than the interests he truly has in his heart. I don't have any kind of disconnect."

To see Edwards at work in New Hampshire, where he came in an embarrassing fourth among Democrats in 2004, is to see his father's son in action, determined to overcome some pretty long odds. This go-round, he has four times the number of field organizers in the state, and he has logged countless hours in small-town forums and community meeting rooms. Armed with a 76-page plan for fighting rural poverty and helping the working poor, he has repositioned himself as the populist who "will fight for you." Maybe something in him relishes being the underdog. But Edwards acknowledges that other forces also propel him. "I thought everybody was smarter than me when I went to college," he says. "And I thought everybody was smarter than me when I walked into a courtroom, and I thought everybody was smarter than me when I went to the Senate." Like his father before him -- who, near the end of his career, finally became a supervisor at the mill -- he would just work harder to prove himself....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121001600_pf.html

[zalinda]

1. Great article

It really does speak volumes about his personality, and his drive.

zalinda

[Czolgosz]

2. kick'd and rec'd

[asdjrocky]

3. Great post

K&R