Edwards faces his biggest test yet

Who is John Edwards? Since his selection as John Kerry's running mate, the photogenic North Carolina senator has graced the covers of Time and Newsweek. His smart, down-to-earth wife and towheaded children round out a picture of the all-American family, albeit with a multimillion-dollar bank account.

It is a tableau meant to complement the more staid Senator Kerry and his quirky billionaire wife, Teresa. But after three weeks on the Democratic presidential ticket, capped by a prime-time acceptance speech Wednesday night, Senator Edwards will find that the biggest test of his short political life lies before him: Can he do anything to nudge his ticket beyond its dead-heat place in the polls versus the Bush-Cheney team? And assuming the Kerry-Edwards team comes out of its convention with at least a small bounce, can he help keep the momentum going to Nov. 2?

"By running a sunny but losing campaign [during the primaries], where he didn't do what it took to win - go negative on Kerry - he was the sunshine boy and the press treated him accordingly," says Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University in North Carolina. "He didn't get the scrutiny [Howard] Dean got and Kerry got; even Wesley Clark got a little roughed up. But Edwards is still untested."

Wednesday night's speech may not be his biggest moment in the national spotlight during the campaign. That will come in the fall when he debates Vice President Cheney, a matchup Edwards will enter as the underdog.

But, as with all political debates, what counts is expectations, not the raw score. Cheney's record of public service is as thick as a phone book, while Edwards has just one nearly completed term as a US senator.

What Edwards needs to do, both Wednesday night and in the debate, is convince the public that he would lend sound judgment to a Kerry White House and have the leadership skills to take over as president if need be. In recent White Houses, the No. 2 job has grown beyond its ceremonial role; in the midst of continuing terror threats, the vice president can be called upon to make unilateral decisions, as Cheney did during the 9/11 attacks.

Still, it's possible that for voters, the best a veep pick can accomplish is to do no harm. Even if the Edwards selection didn't give the Democratic ticket a boost in the polls, at least it didn't produce a chorus of negativity or laughter, which George H.W. Bush encountered when he put another young senator with good hair on his ticket, Dan Quayle. No one questions Edwards's intelligence, charisma, or humble beginnings.

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