On Tour to Highlight Poverty, Edwards Tries to Shift Race's Focus

"We just need someone to tap into that," he said.

The Edwards campaign hopes that Democrats focused on the Iraq war or other issues who don't care that much about poverty will like someone who does. "I think it gives people an insight into the kind of person he is," said Harrison Hickman, Edwards's pollster.

Most of the ideas Edwards is offering to end poverty, such as increasing the minimum wage and integrating neighborhoods so they don't have large concentrations of low-income people, have long been advocated by policy experts, who have been unable to build a strong political consensus behind them.

Edwards said Monday that ending poverty could not be accomplished only by "big government taking care of people," and he visited a restaurant in New Orleans that gives jobs to at-risk youths and a community center, emphasizing his support of innovative solutions for improving poor communities. At the same time, both in New Orleans and in Canton, the federal government was blamed for almost every problem.

While he has emphasized poverty from the time he announced his candidacy in December, he cannot completely claim the issue. Obama, who touts his work as a community organizer in low-income neighborhoods of Chicago before entering politics, will give a speech on urban poverty in Washington on Wednesday. Clinton already delivered a major address detailing how she would seek to reduce income inequality.

"If Edwards falters, it's not a repudiation of themes," said Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale University who advised Edwards on his health-care proposal. "It's a much more populist Democrat field than it was last time. He's not as clearly distinguishable as he was from Democrats in the past."

Despite those complexities, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, seemed determined to change Americans' minds about the issue, at times sounding more like a public service announcement than a presidential campaign.

"When you say 37 million people who live in poverty, it's just a number," Elizabeth Edwards said. "It's too big a number. Part of this tour is to tell a story. This tour has the capacity, as Katrina did, to put a face on the working poor."