The poverty Platform

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.”