Can a candidate with a $400 haircut fight a credible 'war on poverty', asks Denis Staunton, on the road with presidential hopeful John Edwards.
The flags were out in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, for John Edwards this week as he prepared to wind up a three-day tour through the poorest places in the US with a speech outside the local courthouse, but local attorney Jennifer Burke Elliott was uneasy.
"I'm not sure about this war on poverty. We've got good and bad here in Prestonsburg," she said.
Elliott cheered with the rest of the crowd of a couple of hundred when Edwards appeared, dressed in blue jeans, a white open-necked shirt and a navy blazer. At 54, the former vice-presidential candidate still looks boyish, with a deep tan, a brilliant smile and a luxuriant head of chestnut hair.
This week's poverty tour came as Edwards, trailing in the polls, struggled to capture national attention in a Democratic race dominated by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two of the biggest stars in American politics.
Called "The Road to One America", Edwards's tour began in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and went through the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, Cleveland, Youngstown, Pittsburgh and Virginia, before arriving in Prestonsburg.
Edwards chose Prestonsburg as the final stop on his tour because it was here, in 1968, that Robert F Kennedy ended a visit to the poorest parts of eastern Kentucky and heard at first hand of the suffering of those left behind in the war on poverty.
Edwards told the crowd about James Lowe, a 51-year-old disabled coalminer he met earlier that day in Wise, Virginia.
Born with a severe cleft palate, Lowe stopped trying to talk when he was a child and dropped out of school without learning to read and write. With no money to pay for medical treatment, he did nothing about his condition until last year, when he queued for 13 hours at a fairground in Wise, along with thousands of others, for free medical and dental care.
The annual clinic provided by the volunteer Rural Area Medical Health Expedition offers the only treatment many poor people in the region receive all year. Patients travel to Wise from as far away as South Carolina, hundreds of miles away.
"James told us how grateful he was to be able to talk - something he has spent almost all his life not being able to do," Edwards said. "Instead of being angry about it, James was proud. He was strong. He showed the kind of character that I think represents what America is. These people, people like my father, people like James Lowe, they're the people who built America - not these people on Wall Street."
IT WOULD HAVE been a good line, apart from the fact that, after earning almost half a million dollars as a consultant to a hedge fund last year, Edwards could himself be described as one of "these people on Wall Street".
Rivals have seized on the hedge fund, along with Edwards's 2,600sq m mansion in North Carolina, to suggest that his focus on poverty is hypocritical. But nothing has damaged the candidate's credibility as much as the news that he twice spent $400 (€290) on a haircut and billed it as a campaign expense.
A video of Edwards preening as he spends more than four minutes arranging his chestnut quiff has appeared on YouTube with an added soundtrack of I Feel Pretty, and even on the poverty tour he faced repeated questions about his haircut.
In Prestonsburg, a few supporters carried placards reading "Let's pray for Elizabeth", a reference to Edwards's wife, who has terminal breast cancer. Long her husband's most important political strategist, Elizabeth has in recent weeks become something of a campaign attack dog, suggesting this week that Hillary Clinton behaves "like a man" and arguing that Edwards would do a better job for women.
Dee Davis, who runs the Centre for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, 110km south of Prestonsburg, welcomed Edwards's visit to eastern Kentucky and wishes other candidates would see for themselves the challenges people face in the rural US.
"I don't know strategically, politically, whether it works or not but I think it's important that we reframe the discussion in this country," he says. "The general conversation about this election right now is three things: who's ahead; who's got the most money; and what's your position on the war. That's about all we get. So why not use the opportunity and the chance to shine a light on some other issues and just give ourselves a reality check."
There is no disputing the harshness of life in eastern Kentucky, where almost one person in four lives below the poverty line, many without running water and with few available jobs that pay more than minimum wage.
New problems have come to the region recently, including the destructive effects of mountaintop removal mining, where up to 300m is blasted off the top of a mountain to expose the coal below. The debris is dumped into nearby valleys, often contaminating the water with minerals and spreading coal dust through the air.
The past decade has seen an epidemic of addiction to prescription drugs, particularly the painkiller OxyContin, which is so widely abused in rural areas that it is known as "hillbilly heroin".
Suitable for cancer patients because of its slow release over up to 12 hours, OxyContin can be crushed and snorted to produce an immediate effect as powerful as heroin. Hundreds of people in eastern Kentucky and neighbouring West Virginia have died as a result of OxyContin abuse and, in May this year, Purdue Pharma, which markets the drug, admitted that it had lied about its addictive qualities.
The company had marketed the drug aggressively to general practitioners who had little experience of such powerful painkillers and, with many coalminers suffering from severe back pain and other injuries, it soon found a market in places such as Whitesburg. The company agreed to pay $600 million (€435 million) in fines and three executives paid a further $34 million (€25 million).
"They paid fine and basically got probation. That was for dumping highly addictive painkillers intended for cancer victims into rural populations all over the eastern part of the country," says Davis.
"A bunch of poor 'clod-hoppers' get strung out and addicted . . . You see all these wretches, all these families broken up. The question is, how important is that to the rest of the country? It was just country people."
AT THE AGE of 19, TJ Caudill has watched the effects of OxyContin on his father, a coalminer who became addicted to the drug after he picked up a back injury, and who became estranged from his family for five years. Caudill, who has just left high school, is spending the summer learning about film-making at Appalshop, a community arts and education centre in Whitesburg but he is not sure he can stay in the town.
"I love being here. I hate city traffic. I hate walking down the street and brushing against people," he says. "But there's no decent jobs here. For me, it's either going to the coalmines or working in a fast food restaurant on the minimum wage, which you can't live on."
Edwards is trailing far behind Clinton and Barack Obama, both in terms of fundraising and in the national polls, and a poll this week put him fourth, behind New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, in New Hampshire, where the first primary is held next year. Edwards remains ahead in Iowa, however, where the first caucus vote is held, and his focus on economic justice has won him strong support among powerful trade unions.
Rural votes could be crucial in delivering Iowa to Edwards, an early victory that could create enough momentum to give him a real chance of winning the nomination. As he positions himself as the candidate who best embodies traditional Democratic values, talking about poverty may not be such a bad idea.
"The conventional political wisdom is that poor people don't vote and there's a pretty good amount of evidence for that," says Davis. "But what's not really discussed is whether people don't care about these issues. I kind of believe that people in this country care about opportunity. They care about fair shakes. It's not like you want to subsidise people for no reason. But I think there's a general feeling that everyone deserves a fair chance to show what he can do."