http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10edwards-t.htmlThe Money Issue
The Poverty Platform
By MATT BAI
Published: June 10, 2007
This article will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
In April 1964, when Lyndon Johnson sought to rally public support for his new War on Poverty, he did it while sitting on a pile of two-by-fours on a front porch in Inez, Ky. — an appearance that helped establish the Appalachian South as a national symbol of economic deprivation. And so it was fitting that John Edwards, announcing his candidacy for president at the end of last year, chose as his setting not his hometown, Robbins, N.C., where he unveiled his first presidential campaign four years earlier, but the front yard of a mangled brick house in New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward. New Orleans is the new national shorthand for neglect, and it is, not coincidentally, the spiritual center of Edwards’s campaign. After Hurricane Katrina washed away, with brutal efficiency, some of America’s most impoverished neighborhoods, Edwards took more than 700 students to the submerged city to help rebuild homes and schools, and in the months since then, he has never stayed away for long. “I can always tell when he’s been to New Orleans,” says Bruce Raynor, a co-president of the hotel and garment workers’ union, who is close to the former senator. “His passions are stirred. It angers him.”
On his most recent trip to New Orleans, on a Friday early last month, Edwards returned to the Upper Ninth Ward. Riding over in a van with Edwards and the actor Danny Glover, whom Edwards got to know when they toured the country together to help organize hotel workers last year, I remarked that until now I’d seen the hurricane’s damage only through the lens of a television camera. “It hasn’t changed,” Edwards said gloomily, gazing out the window. Rain clouds were gathering. “The Ninth Ward is exactly the same as it was.”
I asked him why.
“That’s a really good question,” he said with a sigh. “I wish I had an answer.”
Our first stop was a Habitat for Humanity rebuilding project. We parked on a block of boarded-up houses, and Edwards, wearing a navy blue work shirt, faded jeans and a tool belt, alighted from the van and walked to the work site, which was instantly surrounded by a swarm of photographers. He shook some hands and smiled, but it was clearly a forced smile, not that Edwards smile that looks as if someone just plugged him into a wall outlet. He waved his hammer around and pounded a nail or two, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Then he answered a round of questions at a microphone stand that had somehow appeared in the street.
Next we piled back into the van and headed over to Orelia Tyler’s little brick house, the one where Edwards first announced his campaign just after Christmas. This was to be a reunion of sorts. “Oh, yeah, I remember this place,” Edwards said as we turned onto Tyler’s street.
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