Edwards' 'O Death' Tour: In Search of a Vanishing Demographic in S.C.

Warming up a crowd for John Edwards yesterday in Lancaster, S.C., the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, a slight man with a shock of white hair, stood alone at a microphone on a flag-bedecked auditorium stage. “I’m death I come to take the soul,” he sang, in a husky a capella warble. “Leave the body and leave it cold … O, Death / O, Death / Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year.”

As campaign anthems go, Stanley’s Appalachian dirge—made famous by the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack—wasn’t exactly “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” But in these last-gasp days, Edwards is striving to convey an authentic cultural connection to his audiences in South Carolina, and sometimes southerners can get pretty gloomy. Especially these days, as the candidate is telling audiences in a bus tour across the upstate that he’s dubbed his “Back Home, Back Roads Barnstorm.”

“When people talk about the mills closing and jobs leaving, nobody has to explain it to me,” the former North Carolina senator, who was born near Seneca, S.C., said at one stop. “I lived through it.”

Edwards won South Carolina in his first run four years ago, and if everything had gone according to plan for him, he would have had a good shot on Saturday. What went wrong for him here is the same thing that went wrong for him nationally: Barack Obama. As Steve Kornacki wrote convincingly in this space not long ago, Obama’s surprise entry a year ago blocked the Democratic Party’s left lane, keeping Edwards from making this a two-person national race against Hillary Clinton. In South Carolina, it’s also effectively taken the large African-American voting bloc, which Edwards won last time, out of contention. He’s been left trying to stitch together a coalition of those voters who aren’t attached to either candidate, who tend to be white, male, rural, and low to middle-income. In South Carolina, they have a word to describe such people. They are called Republicans.

This wasn’t always the case, of course. When I was growing up here, in the 1980s, a popular two-term Democrat, Dick Riley, held the governor’s office, and Democrats ruled the state legislature. For a variety of complex reasons—exhaustively examined elsewhere—the Democratic coalition, which for a generations encompassed Charleston bluebloods, upstate farmers and most everyone (with pale skin) in between, collapsed, mostly because the civil rights movement allowed blacks to join the party, which spurred lower-class whites to leave. This is, of course, a vast oversimplification, and race was not the only factor. In the last two decades, South Carolina’s upstate—the very place Edwards was campaigning on his anti-trade-agreement platform—has benefited enormously from globalization, becoming a center of industry. True, textile mills have closed as jobs have been shifted to China and elsewhere. But what Edwards doesn’t mention is that one of the biggest plants in the area belongs to BMW, where (relatively) low-paid American workers are toiling in jobs that once belonged to people in Stuttgart. The Republican Party, not surprisingly, runs very strong upstate.

In his speeches yesterday, Edwards seemed to acknowledge tacitly that many of the people he is trying to reach belong to another party. “You don’t just have to think about your Democratic friends,” he told a crowd at Limestone College in Gaffney. “If they didn’t vote last Saturday”—when the G.O.P. held its primary—“they can vote this Saturday.” Wearing blue jeans, properly frayed at the cuffs, and a blue pullover, he made a folksy pitch to his audiences, talking about how he’d grown up watching and playing in Friday night high school football games, and going to church on Sundays. At each stop, he was accompanied by Stanley’s bluegrass band and introduced by the folksy former congressman Ben Jones, better known for playing the yokel mechanic Cooter on the “Dukes of Hazzard.” (Edwards actually referred to him as “Cooter” in his speeches.)

The crowds, a couple of hundred at each stop, were overwhelmingly white, and predominantly graying. They seemed enthusiastic as Edwards hit the same points he has throughout the campaign: people need health care and quality jobs, Washington is controlled by special interests, he’s a fighter. He focused most of his attacks on unnamed opponents (Hillary Clinton) who haven’t been spending all their time in South Carolina this week. “They come flying in on their jet, they have an event and they leave,” Edwards said. (Somewhat disingenuously, since he was in New York for a fund-raiser and an appearance on David Letterman earlier this week.) “I’m from here, I understand it,” he went on. “I will never forget where I came from. Never.”

Then, the speech was over and Ralph Stanley, holding hands with the candidate, sang a final song, “Amazing Grace.”