Invoking RFK a 'delicate operation' for Edwards

by Christi Parsons

MARKS, Miss. — As former Sen. John Edwards was touring this Mississippi Delta town the other day, a woman mistook him for a member of the Kennedy clan.

A little while later, the local mayor referred to the Democratic presidential candidate as "Sen. Kennedy" while presenting him a key to the city. Even a man giving Edwards a tour of his neighborhood kept pointing out a certain resemblance.

"The last person who came here seeking national office," the man told Edwards solemnly, "was Bobby Kennedy."

It is a comparison that Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat, has implicitly invited as he wraps up a tour of poverty-stricken areas around the South and Midwest on Wednesday, a faint echo of the lengthy tours that Robert F. Kennedy made before his assassination in 1968.

At the same time, though, Edwards faces some obvious hurdles to pulling it off. As a man who lives in a 28,000-square-foot mansion and who recently made news with his $400 haircuts and his work for a hedge fund, he faces questions about whether his heart is really with the poor.

He clearly has succeeded on one level, namely getting some attention in the slow summer months before next year's primaries. Edwards has leaned heavily on the Kennedy legacy throughout the week, and his tour is scheduled to end in the location of Kennedy's last stop.

At the same time, Edwards lifts the banner at a much different time in history. As angry as some people are today about social inequity and injustice, there isn't the same strength of feeling — passionate war demonstrations, race riots — that roiled the period of Kennedy's rise to influence.

Still, for some, including close associates of Kennedy, the parallel seems apt. Some of them applaud Edwards for emphasizing poverty at a time when it might not seem like a winning issue.

"I do see parallels to Bobby Kennedy, because of their focus on the most serious problem in America," said Frank Mankiewicz, Kennedy's press secretary and a companion on some of the poverty-focused trips.

"I think it's a credit to John Edwards that he's spending a lot of time on an issue that's important and that might not be a source of votes," Mankiewicz said. "But down the road it might have important meaning in history."

Peter Edelman, a close aide to Kennedy, said that RFK wasn't a candidate for president until well into his poverty tours, a notable difference from the tour of Edwards, a declared candidate for his party's nomination for president in 2008.

Kennedy actually took many trips focused on poverty. One of his earliest trips was to California in 1966 for a Senate subcommittee hearing on migrant labor. He continued with subsequent trips to the Mississippi Delta and to an American Indian reservation in South Dakota. His final trip, to Kentucky, took place after he had announced his run for president in 1968.

"His purpose was to dramatize these conditions for the country," Edelman recalled. "He had the ability to bring national television with him . . . The consequence of [Kennedy] seeing those severely malnourished children in Mississippi is that they were on national news that night."

Similarly, this week's "Road to One America" tour has drawn the biggest media crowds the Edwards campaign has seen since he and his wife, Elizabeth, announced the return of her cancer this spring.

Even if the media relay the message, some analysts wonder whether it will have the same resonance with voters.

Poverty is a different kind of problem than it was in the 1960s, and people have a different view of it now, said John Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College who has written about Kennedy.

"We have billions of dollars in social spending that has happened [since the 1960s], and people are much more skeptical about the ability of government to resolve poverty," he said.

At the same time, Edwards has the added challenge of invoking historical legacy, Pitney said, which is "a delicate operation."