The Down and Out Tour

For RFK, authenticity also meant impulsiveness. Touring poor areas of the South, Kennedy would sometimes order his caravan to halt so he could chat with poor children he passed on the roadside. Edwards seems uncomfortable deviating from an established script. Touring a struggling Cleveland neighborhood last week, he walked slowly, letting the TV cameramen set the pace.

Still, Edwards's problems may have less to do with his personal shortcomings than with the reality that RFK's America is gone. Kennedy's poverty crusade came in the waning hours of American utopia. A generation that had lived through the Great Depression and fought World War II still believed no challenge was out of its reach. "For the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty," Lyndon Johnson told Congress in 1964, and the country believed him.

Outrage came easier in that optimistic America. On a 1967 trip to the Mississippi Delta, Kennedy found windowless shacks filled with poor black children, starving to death. He was stunned and so was the nation. "Seeing those children with distended bellies and sores that wouldn't heal on the 'CBS Evening News' that night," recalls Peter Edelman, one of Kennedy's close aides, "the country was really shocked."

There are fewer distended bellies in Edwards's America but there is also less outrage. Today's middle class is driven by its own economic insecurity. Educated professionals worry about health-care costs, mortgage payments and simply getting by. Sensitive to this reality, Edwards says that when he talks of "two Americas," he means not the rich and the poor but the rich and "everyone else." Indeed, many of the cornerstones of Edwards's economic agenda, like universal health care and federal penalties for predatory lenders, have appeal on both sides of the poverty line. But even Edwards admits working Americans have trouble swallowing the notion they have more in common with poor people than they do with the affluent.

Edwards also faces a credibility gap in a country grown cynical since Kennedy's death. He truly means it when he tells audiences they can "eliminate poverty within a generation," for his own biography proves it is possible. But to a weary nation worried about the war in Iraq, the threat of terror and the health of the planet, his words sound like more empty promises from a politician.

Edwards is most believable, most like Bobby Kennedy, when he simply listens. At a forum in Wise, Va., on the final day of the poverty tour, he became visibly moved as he took in the tales of poor Virginians and Kentuckians who'd lived most of their lives without health care. "Are you all listening?" he demanded as he turned to his press corps with a searing, and genuine, rage. The reporters did not respond. Neither has the country, yet. While Edwards has maintained his position as the front runner in several recent polls of Iowa caucusgoers, a New Hampshire poll last week showed him slipping into fourth place behind Clinton, Obama and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. After the Wise forum, a NEWSWEEK reporter asked Edwards how he'll help the poor if he doesn't win the presidency. "When you're running for president ... you can't accept even the notion that it's not going to be successful," he said. "But I know this is my life's work."