Yet with the news that the Kerry campaign would deploy Edwards in the Midwest and West, it soon became clear that the senator's Southern roots were deemed more valuable outside the South than in it, like American tobacco sold abroad. Some strategists even said his popularity at home was so weak that he would not have won re-election to the Senate.
Indeed, Edwards may be the inverse of a Jesse Helms or a Strom Thurmond, former senators who were lionized by many of their constituents but seen by outsiders as anachronisms at best.
Treating Edwards's Southernness as a resource to be strategically allocated says something not only about electoral expedience, but about the South's place in the geography of the American imagination.
It is both the theater of the nation's darkest theme, racism, and the guardian of traditional values.
In the guise of the New South, it projects an image of prosperity, growing demographic complexity and racial redemption. But the South, even the evolved South, remains a place apart.
As a symbol, the New South could not exist without the old; nor could Edwards. He is the son of a millworker, a self-made millionaire, a politician who speaks frankly about racism, even to white audiences, and his story is most compelling seen in the context of where he grew up.
"I think his attraction is that he's the kind of Southerner that Northerners like, maybe even more than Southerners do," said John Maginnis, the publisher of The Louisiana Political Fax Weekly.
"People say, 'Now there's a nice Southern boy.' He expresses this nice, sunny populism."
On the other hand, Maginnis said: "I think there's a lot of Southerners that feel a lot more comfortable with President Bush. They think he probably likes guns more."
But outside the South, Edwards's light drawl tells voters they are "tapping into traditional family values and a hard-work ethic, which allows them to vote for an ostensible liberal without straying too far," said Michael Eric Dyson, a humanities professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has written about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Indeed, one measure of the value of Southern roots could be seen in an editorial last week by the conservative magazine National Review, which warned that despite Edwards's liberal voting record, people might view him as more conservative than he is simply because he is Southern.
But in the South, the senator's record could prove to be a grave vulnerability. He will not play well with suburban white Southerners, who are mostly Republicans, said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "They view Edwards as a trial lawyer who's going to sue them," Black said. The Kerry-Edwards message, he explained, including their opposition to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, is "reinforcing what they don't like about the Democratic Party: The Democratic Party is going to take their money, and won't even support marriage."
Even populism, often pointed to as one of Edwards's selling points, is no longer indigenous to the region, Black said. "Once Southerners became middle class, or had the possibility of becoming middle class, populism died."
But Jack Bass, a professor at the College of Charleston who has written extensively on Southern politics and civil rights, argues that Edwards's idea of "two Americas" resonates with both blacks and working class whites in the region. While the senator will not change the minds of entrenched Republicans, he could win over Southern independents, Bass said. "The South has changed and he's a symbol of that change, to Southerners," he said.
Just as they can temper a candidate's liberalism, Southern roots may add authenticity to a wealthy candidate. "Through his Southernness, he's able to articulate the values of the Democratic Party," said Diane McWhorter, the author of "Carry Me Home," a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Alabama. "They are inextricably part of his story - overcoming the prejudice and the financial hardship. It doesn't play in the actual South, perhaps because people like Edwards remain somewhat exceptional."
But outside the South, Edwards's story, like the region he comes from, serves a redemptive purpose. "The South still plays this huge role in our psyche, and it is where we sort of play out the moral dramas of the country," McWhorter said.
That is not to say that the South is not yet ready for the New South. Many Southerners view Edwards as someone who has, like Bill Clinton, managed to bridge a racial divide that Republicans, they say, have encouraged. "Those of us who love the South and are proud to be Southerners," said Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, "we look forward to campaigning with Edwards, because he gives us the chance to solidify a lot of the things that began to surface with the Clinton presidency."
And many have argued that it would be a mistake for Edwards to overlook the South when campaigning, saying that he innately grasps the intimate style Southerners expect from their politicians.
Representative Melvin Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, said that Edwards had hit upon a way to talk about race that did not alienate people. "I think that is going to play better in the South than anybody really realizes," he said, "and it takes a Southerner to do that."
