The native of the South could emerge as an alternative to John Kerry if he wins the South Carolina primary tomorrow and Virginia and Tennessee on Feb. 10.

01:00 AM EST on Monday, February 2, 2004

BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- "How many times in your life has somebody said to you, 'You can't do this?' " John Edwards asked a group of worshippers yesterday morning after a stirring, two-hour service in a cavernous brick church on the industrial apron of this Southern capital.

"You know what I'm talking about?" the 50-year-old Edwards asked with a flash of his bright smile. The North Carolina mill worker's son was talking, ostensibly, about his rise from blue-collar roots to become a multimillionaire trial lawyer, a U.S. senator and now a Democratic candidate for president.

But to the black congregants of the Bible Way Church of Atlas Road, it was plain that the North Carolina senator was also talking, as a white raised when the Jim Crow laws still ruled the South, about racial discrimination. The theme rang true with several voters still weighing the candidates in tomorrow's Democratic primary.

"I have never known extreme poverty, but being African-American, I often heard coming up through school and in college, 'Cheryl, you can't do that,' " said Cheryl McClinton, who had been leaning toward a vote for retired Army General Wesley K. Clark or Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry.

"Senator Edwards impressed me as sincere and genuine," said McClinton, a career state employee who is launching a small printing and shipping business. After "listening and looking him in the eye" in the church reception hall, "I think I will vote for Senator Edwards on Tuesday," she said.

It is upon such close-up conversions that Edwards has staked his long-shot presidential candidacy. While Kerry jets through the seven states voting tomorrow, depending on lavish advertising and high-powered endorsements, Edwards has returned for the duration to crisscross the state where he was born.

"Clearly, there's a showdown going on in South Carolina," as Edwards said yesterday on the CBS News show, Face the Nation. Polls vary. He may be in a statistical dead heat here with Kerry. He may be edging toward a clear lead with big home-state rallies -- and the attendant local news coverage -- slated for primary eve.

Edwards' goal is to pull away and win here, staking his claim as the leading alternative to Kerry -- something that Clark is attempting in another primary state tomorrow, Oklahoma, and erstwhile favorite Howard Dean will undertake in next weekend's contests in Michigan, Washington and Maine.

Edwards has said he must win South Carolina to continue his candidacy. Neal Thigpen, a political science professor at Francis Marion University, rates his chances here as good. "The guy's rhetoric is strictly 150-proof populism," which could play well in a Democratic primary even if it does not wear well as a general election theme against President Bush in the South.

If Edwards does post a solid win here tomorrow and goes on to score in Virginia and Tennessee on Feb. 10, he could loom as the potential alternative to Kerry, whose sudden front-runner status has, inevitably, drawn critical attention from his opponents and from reporters.

"Then he would have to score an upset some place -- Wisconsin (on Feb. 17) or wherever -- to show electability outside the South," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. Edwards is "an extreme long shot" to upend Kerry's bandwagon, he said, but no other candidate seems better-positioned just now.

What political profile would Edwards strike if he pulls that off? What ground would he claim on the ideological spectrum?

Here is one way that Edwards answers the question -- and the demand for "electability" that has suddenly gripped Democrats intent on winning back the White House: "The South is not George Bush's backyard," Edwards has repeatedly said. "It's my backyard."

The argument, in other words, is that Edwards as a Democratic nominee might compete well with Mr. Bush in one or more of the Southern states or those states bordering the old Confederacy.

On issues and ideology, Edwards has tried to position himself as something of a moderate in that tradition -- most successfully embodied by Bill Clinton, the party's only two-term president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Indeed, interest-group ratings of Edwards' Senate voting record place him somewhat to the right of Kerry, though well within the Democratic mainstream.

The best clues are in the "Two Americas" theme of the well-polished stump speech that has been Edwards' staple from the rural county seats of western Iowa last month to the Bible Way Church yesterday. It is pure populism -- but clothed in a smile, rather than the fiery language of class warfare than Democrats have sometimes unleashed on the GOP.

One America, Edwards says time and again, is skewed against citizens "who pay their taxes and play by the rules" -- the other coddles businesses and rich people.

On some votes, Edwards has supported Mr. Bush's extensive tax cuts, but like Kerry and unlike Dean, he opposes rolling back child-care credits and other tax breaks that help the middle class.

In his CBS television interview yesterday, Edwards acknowledged that means he would raise some taxes -- on individuals who earn more than $200,000 a year, on capital gains above $300,000 and in the form of closed "loopholes" in corporate taxation.

Edwards has also sought to seize the chief symbol of South Carolina's economic insecurities, the long decline of the once-booming textile industry. On Friday, Edwards began airing a TV ad in which he says, "It's easy for candidates to talk about manufacturing and jobs, but I've lived it and I have not forgotten it. My Dad worked in textile mills to put food on our table and clothes on our backs.

"Today, the mills are gone. And so are the jobs. That's why I opposed NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted during the Clinton administration) and why I'll end tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas," Edwards says, concluding with a pledge "to keep American jobs right here in America."

Without naming Kerry, the Edwards ads make a contrast with him. Kerry, who voted for NAFTA, argued that it would help, on balance, to create jobs.

But the trade issue underlines how tricky economic populism could be for Edwards. For example, he backed regularized trade status for China -- a position opposed by the textile industry but supported by segments of the agriculture and technology industries that employ many North Carolinians.

But in something as personal as the choice of a president, Cheryl McClinton of the Bible Way congregation said personality can be as important a factor as the dry details of votes on issues. She liked Edwards, she said, "because he impressed me as genuine and sincere."

Political scientist Thigpen senses that Edwards' deft personal touch will help him among South Carolina Democrats who are bridling at what appears to be the Washington establishmment's early anointment of Kerry.

"A lot of Democrats and independents are saying, 'I'll go with the local guy. Blood's thicker than water,' " he said.

Which is why Edwards planned to conclude a long campaign day yesterday in a Charleston sports bar with what he likes to call "regular people" -- rooting for the regional underdogs, the Carolina Panthers, to upset the favored New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.