(Updates with fresh quotes, detail, changes dateline) By Matthew Bigg CANTON, Miss., July 16 (Reuters) - Hurting in opinion polls and haunted by charges of lavish personal spending, Democrat John Edwards took his presidential campaign on Monday to some of the most impoverished parts of the country. Tackling poverty is a key promise of his campaign and the former vice presidential candidate launched an eight-state tour in New Orleans, whose profound privation was exposed to a global audience when Hurricane Katrina swept through in August 2005. His focus on poverty challenges his top Democratic rivals, U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and enables Edwards to present himself as a leader with a cause bigger than his own ambition, analysts said. "This is not a political strategy. This is a huge moral issue facing America," Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina and the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, said in New Orleans. Edwards is third among Democrats in national opinion polls ahead of the November 2008 elections, behind leader Clinton of New York and Obama of Illinois. But he is strong in the crucial early-voting state of Iowa, where he leads many state polls. Edwards, 54, has used his own story -- his father was a mill worker and he was the first child in his family to go to college -- to identify himself with people of modest means. But he has been stung by criticism that lavish spending on a new mansion in North Carolina and $400 on a haircut compromised his stand as an anti-poverty champion. CHEATED WORKERS He later flew to Mississippi and heard poultry workers in the city of Canton say they were exploited. Leice Caldwell described being assigned to lift chickens from a conveyor belt onto hooks above her head even though she was pregnant. "It was bad, very bad," she said. "People think that a lot of people who live in poverty are just ne'er-do-wells who don't work hard," Edwards said, adding that he had not spoken directly to employers in the area. "But they have a hard time paying their bills and supporting their families because ... their pay is low ... they don't have the (right) kind of benefits and ... they are actually being cheated," said Edwards, who proposed raising the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2012. The U.S. government defines poverty as an annual income of about $20,000 for a family of four, and Edwards argues it is unacceptable that 37 million Americans fall under that threshold. Analysts said his strategy could backfire in a country where few define themselves as poor and many voters see poverty as due to bad individual choices. "To the extent that they (voters) think poverty is an issue, they think it's a poor, black person's fault," said history professor William Jelani Cobb at Spelman College in Atlanta. Even among poor voters, Edwards struggles to match Clinton and Obama. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed him trailing Clinton by 45 percentage points and Obama by 10 percentage points among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents with household incomes below $20,000. But Edwards, who has stops in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Memphis and in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky on the tour, said he would be happy if he has shone a light on the lives of struggling workers even if it proves a vote loser.
