He usually arrives at his events to the blaring sound of John Cougar Mellencamp singing "I was born in a small town." And it never takes him long to tell his audience he was reared by working-class parents in mill towns of the Carolinas and was the first in his family to go to college.

When Democrats ask him on the trail why they should choose a one-term senator who has spent most of his life as a trial lawyer rather than a candidate with more government experience, he says his roots give him an understanding of working folks' problems that career politicians lack. Working-class voters are the ones he believes President Bush has abandoned, and he asserts that they will trust John Edwards, just as North Carolina juries have trusted John Edwards in a dozen big cases.

"This president is shifting the tax burden from wealth to work and the working class," he railed at a forum in Des Moines. "I want this president to explain to middle-class working families why a millionaire sitting by a swimming pool getting a financial statement each month to see how much money he made is paying a lower tax rate than a secretary, than a firefighter, than a schoolteacher. This is not our America."

Yet the senator, having made a fortune in personal-injury law over the past two decades, is really more like the poolside millionaire than the schoolteacher, at least on the surface. He won his first and only race, for the United States Senate in 1998, with more than $6 million of his own money. Even though he may well be out of office within a year, he bought a second town house in Washington for $3.8 million a year ago because his wife found the first one unsuitable for their children.

Mr. Edwards is a strange political animal: a multimillionaire who harbors a laborer's anger; a man with an expensive haircut who wears a cheap digital watch and worn-down shoes; the owner of four houses who employs a live-in nanny and a housekeeper but still celebrates his wedding anniversaries at Wendy's because that was what he and his wife did when first married.