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."

Few presidential candidates in recent years have emphasized fighting poverty as much as Edwards.

Following the 2004 campaign, in which he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Edwards created the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity in Chapel Hill, which produced a series of seminars and a book on poverty. Edwards has proposed a $15 billion to $20 billion per year anti-poverty program that includes universal health care coverage, 1 million temporary public jobs, housing vouchers, raising the minimum wage and new laws to encourage organized labor, among other things. Edwards has set a goal of ending poverty in 30 years.

Poverty still an issue?

Poverty was once a potent issue, championed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. But as the nation became more middle class, poverty has receded as an issue.

In a Gallup Poll conducted last month, only 5 percent of those surveyed mentioned poverty, hunger and homelessness when asked what was the top issue facing the country.

"I think we came to times, starting with President Reagan, where there was a too widespread view in our country that if somebody was poor it was their own fault," said Peter Edelman, a poverty expert and former Robert Kennedy aide. "I think too many politicians, in terms of talking about it openly and honestly, felt it was a little too risky to challenge that preconception."

Even President Clinton, who supported tax breaks for the working poor, tended not to frame the issue as fighting poverty, Edelman said.

But Edelman said there are signs that poverty is getting more attention, mainly because of growing economic inequality. Edelman said that while there may be 37 million Americans whose income is under the poverty line, there are 90 million people who are having trouble paying their bills every month.

Poor support Clinton

Neither Clinton nor Obama has stressed fighting poverty like Edwards. But Clinton can tap into her husband's legacy and Obama once worked as a community organizer on the Southside of Chicago.

Poor people have not been flocking to Edwards' campaign. According to a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, Clinton had the support of 55 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents with household incomes below $20,000. Obama had 20 percent and Edwards had 10 percent.

But Edwards' target is not just poor people. He's also hoping to appeal to party liberals and leaders and organized labor, who share his view that the government should take a more active role in combating poverty. The Edwards campaign is also using the poverty trip to raise a little money, asking supporters to contribute $8 -- a reference to the fact that one of eight Americans lives in poverty.

Edwards appeared to be making inroads along the antipoverty trail, but it was still difficult. James Figgs, a school transportation director, said he was supporting Edwards for now.

"He is the only one who has shown interest," Figgs said. "But if Obama comes, because he's an African-American, he'll probably win here."