CANTON, MISS. - Not many presidential candidates make it to Mount Levi Full Gospel Baptist Church, across the street from a battered trailer park and a chicken processing plant.

"No, sir," said Leice Murry Caldwell, a middle-aged former chicken processing plant employee, when asked whether she had met a presidential candidate before talking Monday with Democrat John Edwards. "This is a gift from God."

Rural Mississippi is fly-over country in presidential campaigns -- largely ignored because of its late primary and its lack of well-heeled Democrats who could raise big money.

But Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, is detouring off the main road to the White House in an effort to get his stride back.

Edwards is trying to get past the Richie Rich stories of $400 haircuts and a 28,000-square-foot house outside Chapel Hill that have plagued his campaign. He's trying this week to get refocused on fighting poverty, one of his principal issues.

"I want to shed a light on the poverty that still exists in America," Edwards said after meeting with poultry workers in Canton.

On Monday, Edwards began a three-day, eight-state tour that will take him from Mississippi to inner-city Cleveland and the mountain hollers of Appalachia.

The trip is laden with symbolism. It included a stop in the impoverished Delta town of Marks, Miss., where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. started his Poor People's March on Washington in 1968, and it ends Wednesday in Prestonburg, Ky., the last stop of New York Sen. Robert Kennedy's 1968 tour of Appalachian poverty.

Edwards began Monday in Katrina-damaged New Orleans, where he had announced his candidacy in December. Edwards promised a series of measures to help rebuild New Orleans, including the creation of 50,000 temporary public jobs for Gulf Coast residents for construction work and the opening of a new Veterans Administration hospital.

"We have a moral responsibility to get New Orleans back on its feet," Edwards said.

Promises to workers

In Canton, Edwards visited with workers and former workers of a poultry processing plant, and promised to create a Department of Labor task force that would target those industries where there tend to be abuses of the overtime and minimum wage laws.

Mamie Chinn, a district court judge from Canton, was not surprised that Edwards made Canton, a city that is 80 percent black, a stop on his poverty tour. While some areas near the growing Jackson suburbs are prospering, other areas are reminiscent of "a Third World country," Chinn said.

"You would not believe you are in the U.S.," Chinn said. "It looks like it's been bombed out."

In Marks, Edwards led a contingent of supporters and reporters on a walk down Cotton Street. There, he stopped and visited Sammie Henley, who in 1968 achieved a kind of fame. King wept when he visited Henley's house, which had been flooded. Edwards sat quietly and chatted with Henley. She told him that life was still difficult and that she was existing on $620 a month.

But at least the town filled in the potholes on her street the morning of Edwards' visit.

Losing ground

The candidate's trip comes as Edwards has been losing ground to his chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, in money, the polls and attention. It also occurs as his campaign appears to be distracted by controversies highlighting the personal fortune he made as a trial lawyer.

"He has to do something to draw some attention to himself and to his campaign other than the attention he has been getting about his money, his haircut and his house," said Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University. "That is not playing well. He has to change the focus of the attention he is getting. I read this poverty trip as an attempt do that."

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