Published June 10, 2007
The 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.
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