The evolution of John Edwards - SDUT

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What happened to his son swept Edwards off a road, too, changing his life's direction and ambitions. For 20 years, he had been a successful malpractice attorney, earning millions of dollars... His son's fatal accident helped draw Edwards, now 50, into politics. He wanted to be a strong voice for the poor and working class with whom he grew up in a one-highway town in North Carolina, his friends said.

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In the summers, Edwards worked on construction crews and swept mill floors... Even as a teenager, he was "quick on his feet, not the kind of person with a lot of ups and downs," said boyhood friend, John Frye Jr., now a Presbyterian minister in Aiken, S.C.

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Eventually, a jury awarded $25 million in damages to the 5-year-old girl and her family, the largest damage award in North Carolina history... "He's the essence of calm under fire and thinks well on his feet, and he's a person who genuinely cares about other people," the girl's father, David Lakey, said of Edwards. "He has a depth of energy that very few people have."

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"The typical cases for Edwards involved clients who were catastrophically injured," said Mike Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly. "And those personal injury cases could have run the gamut, ranging from medical malpractice cases involving doctors to trucking companies, nurses, hospitals, the Red Cross and sometimes corporations like charter hospitals. The defendants were typically corporate entities."

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The push for jobs growth is a message he continues to deliver on the campaign trail in his bid for the presidency and he repeatedly talks about two Americas, one for the very wealthy and one for everyone else. He is an outspoken critic of the North American Trade Agreement and the "outsourcing" of jobs overseas. He argues for rolling back a portion of President Bush's tax cuts on the upper-income, but not the middle and lower economic classes.

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